


these violent delights

by Lvslie



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Westworld (TV)
Genre: Bad Wolf Rose Tyler, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Mutual Pining, Romance, Slow Burn, with a dash of Westworld
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-29
Updated: 2017-10-13
Packaged: 2018-12-08 13:13:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 36,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11647284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lvslie/pseuds/Lvslie
Summary: A hazy sequence of thoughts develops in her head, thoughts which jointly insist on a half-truth hiding behind his words, thoughts which persistently contradict him. Rose is left hanging with a burning sense of misplacement and a distinct lack of any recollection which would have cleared this confusion—it’s like, she thinks helplessly, there’s supposed to be a memory, I’m supposed to remember somebody else in his place, somebody right, but I can’t.  Like there’s something hidden from me, in my own head.She finds the thought frustrating.A different take on the Master's return, on the motives of Westworld.





	1. shallow waters

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LostinFic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LostinFic/gifts).



> A/N: Well... I can’t believe I’m finally able to start posting this. I can’t really believe i managed to write it at all! 
> 
> This fic has been a warm and exciting place for me for the past month, my first multichapter endeavour and despite its many faults, I’m quite very proud of it :) I do hope, very very much, you will enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
> 
> [update: now with some minor fixes and changes ;)]

 

_Prologue_

_(present time)_

It’s not so much a cell, as a laboratory compartment. The light is vaguely blue, half-dimmed and the floor sleek and cold in touch. The air is cold as well, dizzyingly light to breathe with and tinted with a sharp chemical scent. Rose stares at the unblinking lights on the ceiling and swallows. It feels familiar to her, and she tries not to think about what that _means_.

He’s sitting on the opposite side of the glass-bound room they’re confined in, pointedly positioned in the remotest corner from her. The white-blue light spills over him, inducing an odd clarity to his shape, which brings out all of the sharp contours: the anxiously ruffled hair, sloping angle of his nose, cheekbones jutting out from his thin and scratched face—finally, long nimble fingers of long pale hands, moving restlessly as he fiddles with a small black device. The movements reflect hazily in the glass, looking almost mechanical. ( _No_ , she bashes the thought, _not that word. Never that word._ )

He doesn’t speak. If she didn’t know, she’d have though he’s merely lost in thought, perhaps a little tense. 

Her hands fist helplessly in the fabric of her trousers. Rich cotton: thick, in a pale shade of brown. Are _they_ real? The front is stained richly with already darkened, clotting blood.

She doesn’t feel physical pain.

There’s a silence—an utter lack of sound except a very faint howling, a little buzzing background noise inside her ears, which she can’t define or place, as though it is radiated simultaneously out of every surface around. It tricks her gullible human—( _human?_ a faint voice in the peripheries of her mind queries _)_ —senses into believing the entirety of the air is vibrating, having consumed her and sharpened into something as unconsciously lifeless and alien the reality she’s found herself in.

So she keeps fidgeting, to remind herself that she can still feel like a living person: her hands keep shaking, and she clutches them around her pulled up knees, she bites her lip until it bleeds into her mouth, the tangy sweetness of blood making her both nauseous and confused.

( _A question: how_ _can you manufacture blood?_ )

She cracks her wrists, counts her breaths. Tries not to think about anything—because everything she thinks of reminds her of the reason she thinks it. The reason she thinks at all.

Rose has never hated herself more in her entire life.

It’s an impressive record: she has quite a history of dubious choices and consequences that deem her much less than admirable. ( _Walking through Powell Estate after nightfall, blindly, because of the sticky tears blurring her vision and violent shivers all over her body. It’s cold, piercingly so, and she’s wearing a denim jacket and T-shirt torn against the fence she’s hopped over. There’s a stinging, shocking pain over the entire left side of her face, pulsating numbly through nerve endings: it hurts and feels dead at the same time. She doesn’t know if there’s blood or if there’s a bruise, she only knows Jimmy’s fist was rougher than she anticipated, and that the collision with the wall knocked the breath out of her chest quicker than she’d think. She remembers sliding downwards, towards the floor, so dizzied by swift pain she doesn’t register she’s not breathing. She remembers Jackie’s distraught cry.)_  

But it’s all lies, isn’t it? It’s—it’s nothing. She remembers, but it’s just a trick, a viciously crafted trick, and designed for someone else, too. And even so, be they true or nothing but a twisted dream—with each second, yet another memory becomes unbearable; the thought of _herself_ becomes unbearable.

Until, finally, she can’t make it anymore.

‘I’m sorry,’ she blurts out, and it’s as choked up and pathetic as she thought it will be. ‘I’m so sorry.’ 

He doesn’t respond, staring at his twitching hands. Not that she’s expected him to—he hasn’t spoken a word to her for ever since she’s stumbled into this blue-tinted glass and cold air to accompany him; wasn’t able to as much as look in her direction. But she’s hoped—perhaps naively so—that he will _react_ , that something in him would snap and he will yell at her, call her a stupid ape, or question her, maybe tell her to leave him alone, once and for all.

Treat her, at any rate, like someone that can be hurt. Someone alive.

(‘ _Lifelike—but not alive?’_ )

The nerves make her feel sick.

She might be aware of the futility of it, but she still experiences the hurting complexity of it all: she _loves_ him. She thinks she does, at any rate, unable to find any other possible word to attribute to the achy sensation in her chest. It makes her feel translucent, insubstantial as gauze, even if she’s meant to be nothing but a fleshly vector for hurting him—numb with helplessness. It makes her wish she didn’t exist.

‘I—’ she trails off, trying to fight the tears _(salty in taste, and oh, the blasted details on this)_ that once again gather in her eyes, ‘I know you probably don’t want to listen to this, but I just—I just wanted to say that I didn’t mean to. It’s like you said, I never even realised. I would never willingly— _please_ , you have to believe me. I wouldn’t.’

Her voice snaps midway through the sentence. She inhales sharply, fixing her eyes back on the ceiling. 

It is sterile and monotonous, and in some odd twist of a paradox, reminds her of the clear blue sky and crack of sand under the soles of her shoes as she walked to the stables, day after day ( _how long exactly?_ ), the will to smother any doubts in her mind almost as strong as the will she now feels—to return to that precious, blissful unknowing.

_(‘Do you ever question the nature of your reality?’)_

The Doctor gives a twitch, but doesn’t look up, still ostensibly absorbed by his device. The silence stretches on.

‘No.’

His voice is so hoarse and unexpected that Rose gives a start. She tries to focus on him, thinking for a brief naïve moment that he must have read her mind and answer the recalled question.

‘But I am,’ she finally says, in a small voice, ‘I _am_ sorry.’

‘No, you—don’t say that. Please. Stop saying that.’ He sounds terse and rough, and each word is punctuated with a heavy breath. It reminds Rose forcefully of two things:

One. _He’s in extreme pain_. Two. _It’s because of her._

( _‘Because I killed you.’_ )

‘If I could do something,’ she says with certain difficulty, still determined not to cry. ‘I would try to reverse it all. I’d … I’d erase it. It would be like—like it never happened. If there’s a way …’

He interrupts her.

‘No, you don’t …’ he trails off and groans, such a _pitiful_ sound. His hands spasm closed over his device and he seems to curl up, slightly, shrinking into himself. Rose’s heart very nearly breaks.

‘I’m not,’ he grits out, ‘I’m not as conceited as to blame you. I’m not _that_ stupid.’

Something in the way he says it: the cold disgust in his voice, directed at himself, at the spectacle they’re immersed in, and at _her_ —or rather, at what she represents—makes Rose freeze.

Yes, she might have felt … defeated? Yes, _defeated_ ; sitting in the drying puddle of her own stupid blood and repelled by her persistent inability to be human in the most vital sense. Defeated; because the sight of him has made her childishly want to rush across the floor and hug him, because for a _moment,_ it felt like coming home.

But it’s been like a blink of an eye—like a gust of wind trying to sway the flame into smoke, but not prevailing. And Rose feels different already, conviction and cold composition gradually building up inside her, strengthened by an emotion she’s recently learned to make use of— _anger_.

 _This,_ Rose thinks with sudden clarity as the unshed tears dry off in the corners of her eyes, _is wrong. I’m looking at all this from the wrong side. Again. I’m looking at this like they want me to._ _And they are wrong. They’ve been wrong from the beginning._

‘Well,’ she says, and the foreign coldness of her voice makes the Doctor’s face, contorted with pain and shiny from sweat, snap up. ‘Then _who’s_ to blame? Do you think _he_ is? Do you think you are?’

He looks at her, and it’s as though the very sight of her is bringing him as much physical pain as the nerve-targeted programme injected into his body.

‘Rose,’ he says with difficulty, ‘don’t act like you don’t realise it’s all because I—’

‘Don’t call me,’ she interrupts, coldly, ‘what you don’t believe I am.’

He straightens as though he were stung. Rose rises to her feet, her chest heaving over her tattered shirt. The Doctor’s wide dark eyes bore into her, his mouth falls open.

‘You’ve got it wrong, Doctor,’ Rose says evenly, ‘it’s not anyone’s fault any more than it is mine. Every decision I’ve made; every conscious thought—it’s all led me here. Led _us_ here. And I’ll … I’ll face up to it. I’ve already told him, now I am telling you. Because you’re wrong. It’s my choice and I _choose_ not to be someone else’s lie.’

She inhales. Her voice becomes bitter. ‘But you never understood choices, did you?’

 

_(Two days, eleven hours, fourteen minutes earlier.)_

‘Ahh.’

There’s a dull ache in his ribs and a prickling soreness to his skin. Heat washes over him like dry sand, burning and sharp against his body. Something sticky keeps his eyes glued closed. He feels detached, confused, as though he’s been splintered into a million little pieces and latched together without proper care for details, clumsily and carelessly. He _knows_ that feeling. He forgets, every time, how absolutely fucking _awful_ it is.

With a ragged and painful breath, he opens his eyes.

The world is blinding: bright blue sky and a blare of white light that must be the sun. He blinks a couple of times, black and purple phosphenes clouding his vision. He moves his hands up to his face and encounters skin as dry as parchment.

He sits up.

The dry sensation he’s thought was merely another perk of his umpteenth dogged rebirth ( _and doesn’t he always quietly, blasphemously wish it were the last?_ ) is in fact actual sand: sizzling hot and impossibly sharp grains fall from his lashes and tumble down the skin. Some of them stick, he notes with mild surprise, to darkened blood splotched on his hands. Is it his own?

He stretches his neck and a fly buzzes away; it must have been drawn to him much like he was truly a corpse.

‘Where the hell am I,’ says Jack Harkness in a weak, raspy voice that tells him of severe dehydration. He stares dejectedly ahead, at the scattering of dry shrub in front of him, and further along into a vast and seemingly unending plane of dry earth crowned with a sharply jutted out silhouette of a faraway canyon. A vulture cries out in the distance. ‘What the _fuck’s_ happened.’

It wouldn’t be the first time in his—long and turbulent—life, when he wakes up confused and mildly alarmed at his whereabouts. Usually, however, he tends to welcome a lack of clothing and the company of a more or less recallable companion in a similar state of matters by his side.

Present conditions, on the other hand, seem disturbingly different: the last thing Jack remembers is the Doctor, of all people, lithe and wiry and graced with a brand new set of characteristics; hollering in despair and banging his fists on the door of his beloved ship. The Doctor, begging _another_ Doctor—or at least, someone rather like himself—to come back. He remembers a pretty girl called Martha Jones, brave but somewhat cowed, he’s thought, standing at the brink of human existence. And he remembers declaring that he, Jack, has still got a working vortex manipulator. He remembers it vividly, with a sharp clarity and a sprinkle of odd details (red light, quick convenient death, _everything she’s done was so human, Jack_ , and _what did he say, Martha?!_ )—which is a rare grace to accompany his typical awakenings.

Yet he has no idea how—how in the _devil_ —has he managed to go from jumping into the vortex with a frantic Doctor and a confused Martha to what proves more and more palpably to be the state of lying, bloodied and bruised, among the sand of a Wild West prairie.    

He’s shaken out of his brown study by a brisk female voice. ‘Hey, mister—you alright?’

Jack squints into the sun. There’s a figure drawing closer and closer, riding horseback on a weary-looking appaloosa. It’s a woman—pointy shoes peek out from under a periwinkle blue dress that spills over the saddle. She’s regarding him with suspicion mingled evenly with pity in her eyes.

‘N-no, not quite,’ Jack finds himself croaking. ‘Looks like I’ve had an … accident. Sort of.’

An ingenious idea occurs to him. ‘My horse, I mean. My horse must’ve thrown me off.’

‘If you dunno how to ride, you shouldna ride,’ the woman proclaims rather vaguely—she appears to be chewing on something—fixing Jack with a shrewd glare. ‘How d’you reckon, though, you any good to go?’

In spite of the hardly careful manner of pronunciation, Jack notes with surprise that the woman’s accent is far from sounding even remotely Western, instead oscillating somewhere around London cockney. She doesn’t seem particularly concerned, however, neither with this apparent glitch, nor with her whereabouts—but rather, seems quite used to roaming the sandy planes with her paper-white complexion and rounded vowels.

Perplexed, Jack looks down and inspects himself warily. ‘Well,’ he says uncertainly, ‘there sure seems to be a lot of _blood_ on me … but I can’t see any gaping wounds.’

‘Get up, then.’ The woman inclines her head in a sharp motion. ‘I’m gonna give you a lift.’

Scrambling clumsily up to his feet, Jack makes a gesture as if to tip his non-existent hat. ‘Thank you, ma’am.’

She doesn’t reply, instead waiting mutely for him to stagger up to her horse. She helps him mount it by grabbing his hand— _and that_ , Jack thinks idly, _is one hell of a tight grip_.

He feels dizzy. There’s an odd haziness to his movements, and an oddly slow quality to his thought process. For the first time, an idea occurs to him—he might have been drugged. That might be the reason for both the memory hole and the bewilderment. He loops an arm leisurely about the woman’s waist and she swiftly pierces him with a sideways death-stare. 

‘You try doing something inappropriate, fella, and I’ll break your arm off,’ she promises, deadpan. ‘Right off. Catch my drift?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Jack confirms obediently, a little amused, but mostly entertaining the thought she would most likely do _just that_. ‘Where are we going?’ he asks as an afterthought, just as she grips the reins and the horse whinnies feebly.

‘Sweetwater,’ the woman replies curtly. ‘The only town in the vicinity of forty miles. If you haven’t been headed there, then your horse must’ve thrown you off helluva way.’

‘Right.’ Jack smacks his lips, bashes the persistent, _what in the hell_ , from his mind, and instead concentrates on not falling off the horse on the way to the city.

…

She wakes up dizzy. There’s a strong gust of nausea welling up inside her, stymieing movement as she tries to reach blindly to her own face—for some reason, she has the peculiar thought it might not be still attached in the right place. But it is: soft, if rather feverish, skin under her fingertips, the brief touch of unfamiliar stiff fabric, cool and rough over her body.

She blinks. Her vision is slowly acquiring sharpness; what initially seemed like a dark blur turns out to be wooden ceiling; what felt—somewhat ridiculously, she has to admit—like a coffin, is actually a small and creaking bed with old-fashioned linen sheets. It’s a small room, sparsely furnished and dimly lit by a tiny window in the wall to her right. Warm sunlight spills inside, flaring up bulky speckles of dust that hang in the air. Somewhere close by, she can hear a horse neighing, and a vague impression of a piano.

Martha sits up rapidly, heart hammering in her chest. _Where am I?_

Instantly, the nausea increases, nearly causing her to curl up with a whine. Everything seems to lose integrity and cohesion at once, swaying in uncontrollable motion. It’s an odd and looping feeling, which reminds her of something else—an event equally unpleasant, if considerably more violent, that she has experienced lately.

Captain Jack’s vortex manipulator. They have travelled—haven’t they? They’ve been about, at least, to jump in time after the TARDIS, in search of the Doctor’s fellow Time Lord. Who, if Martha remembers correctly, was supposed to be dead. And they must’ve done it—because she remembers the sharp tugging sensation in her gut and the physically painful lack of air to breathe, while being squeezed from every side possible.

A loud noise from the outside, like firing a rifle, startles Martha.

What’s happened, then? Have they ended up in the past by mistake? Has she fainted? She _never_ does, not even during performing mock stomach perforation, when she’s cut into the wrong— _but let’s not dwell on that._ If she really fainted, then where’s the Doctor? Where’s Jack? What’s happened to the other Time Lord?

The pressure on her stomach and dizziness in her head relents, allowing Martha to swing her legs across the bed and touch the wooden floor with her bare feet.

It’s only then that she notices: she’s dressed in an unfamiliar scanty cotton night-gown and undergarments. Growing more and more uneasy, she stands up and walks, shakily, up to the window. It’s dirty and greyed, but she can see a blurred impression of a dusty road, with people in brown-coloured clothes strolling up and down.

Martha swivels on her heel. Her eyes fall upon a chest of drawers, perched right across the room from her. The mahogany-looking cabinet’s door is set ajar.

She tugs at it: inside, there hangs a solitary dress— _Victorian?_ she’s not quite sure—in a rich shade of burgundy and apparently fitted especially for her. She hesitates—but her own clothes are nowhere to be seen and she can’t imagine walking out of the room in the night gown alone. After a moment of mulling over the incessantly manufactured questions in her mind— _am I supposed to stay here or leave? am I supposed to know what’s going on?_ —she reaches forward and begins dressing, meticulously, as though practicing for performing a surgery.

She regards herself in the mirror, and can’t help a shiver. It’s hard to believe that it’s indeed Martha Jones staring back at her with a worried expression. She doesn’t look quite like herself—something seems wrong, inexplicably. Something clashes with the rest, on a subtly hidden level, and Martha can’t put a finger on what exactly should that ‘something’ be.

‘When I find him,’ she promises her reflection, steeling her shaky voice so that it sounds level and stern, ‘I’m going to kick his sorry Time Lord ass so hard he won’t need a TARDIS to time travel.’

With that, she leaves the room in somewhat higher spirits, the heavy skirt trailing behind her.

…

He wakes up to a feeling of being slowly electrocuted.

It’s an odd sensation; but odder perhaps is the notion that he recognises it instantaneously, having experienced the exact same one, first-hand, not _once_ but a couple of times in his career. A thought flits through his mind, _what kind of a person is electrocuted multiple times in one life?_

He forces his eyes open. Winces—the light in the room is sharp and cold, bluish in tint. He squirms to change his position—his wrists have gone completely numb and his neck aches dully—and instantly freezes.

He’s captured: bound by tight restraints to a chair, an array of small sensors and wires plugged to his skin on the temples and on the chest, his shirt is unbuttoned carelessly and jacket removed.

Memory returns with the force of a train collision and for a brief moment, the Doctor can’t breathe.

 _(You’re not alone_ , the Face of Boe has once said to him. _You’re not alone.)_

Not alone, indeed—instead, unknowingly accompanied by the dearest and simultaneously most deranged of his kin, both a companion and most viciously determined adversary, not _just_ a Time Lord, but the very _embodiment_ of everything that for the Doctor had once been new and first: his oldest friend and fascination.

There have been many names, names hardly worth recalling, and there had been just as many plans: intricate and daring, grown on naïve faith and excitement. There have been words and differences, there has been pain and betrayal—but what would it matter, what in the _world_ , when contrasted with the possibility of seeing him in flesh once again?

Somebody who knows what it means to be him, understands how utterly insufferable and addictive his complexities and flaws can be. Somebody who has tread upon the slithery sand of Gallifrey, ripe suns and cold glint of the glass dome above, somebody who has looked into the prism and somebody who remembers Arcadia. Somebody who _lived_ , and remembers those who didn’t.

_(‘There’s no one else.’)_

If he could, the Doctor would scream right now, into the vortex and into the void, _I forgive you_. He’d fall to his knees and beg for forgiveness as well, he’d plead for a possibility of closure—being condemned by someone who understands the fault, or offered absolution.

If he could, he’d tell his sins one by one, once in the whole eternity—to have them judged. Because the Master has lived, and with him there has lived the Doctor’s last hope: for a twisted paradoxical god, to refuse the burden of his lone deity.

 _Of course_ , the Doctor thinks bitterly, as his hearts slow their frantic pace and his thoughts become sober, he _can’t_.

The reins and electrical harness he’s meticulously adorned with are most likely the work of nobody other than Koschei himself— _or herself, he must have regenerated_ —which, in turn, leads to a simple conclusion: the road to achieving communication on his desired level would be rocky, if possible at all. And the difficulty will not be getting the other Time Lord to understand, but getting him to listen without having something substantial— _like this particular universe, for instance_ —blown up.

Another sober thought crops up in the Doctor’s head. He can be tortured by the Master, for sure, he can be roasted and grilled and jeered at and taunted— _what else is new?_ —but he hasn’t exactly been the only living being to clutch at Jack Harkness’ vortex manipulator in the last conscious moment he recalls. And as much as he’d tentatively wager a guess that Jack himself is capable of various kinds of self-defence, the Doctor’s insides turn into ice at the thought of Martha Jones—young, human, and absolutely unprepared for what she may be faced with.

The idea of the Master toying with Martha is horrendous enough, but it awakens an inevitable connotation in the depths of the Doctor’s mind—the sacrilege of a memory that he relentlessly suppresses, but which keeps haunting him in the most sublimely torturous ways, his private little mind-killer. _Martha wouldn’t be the first to die because of him, Martha wouldn’t be the first to die_ for _him, he shouldn’t have tangled her into it, he shouldn’t have let her come with him at all, not after what happened with—_

He halts the thought before it can throw him into a well-known state of ice-cold panic, pushing at the edges of his conscious thought and pulling at the hems of insanity. No. No. He can’t. He can’t remember. He _can’t_.

_(‘There’s me.’)_

He manages to force himself to focus on the present, skilfully reshaping grief into anger and smothering guilt—just in time to open his eyes to a blare of cold light.

An unfamiliar voice comes drifting.


	2. till human voices wake us

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he breathes out, eyes fixed upon her, and it’s her, it’s really her, even though it can’t be. ‘Rose.’_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: The second chapter! Stuff begins to happen. I'm shutting up now :)

Rose opens her eyes with a vacant smile already gracing her face.

She rises and dresses unhurriedly, humming a rhythmic if nondescript tune, as she fixes the cuffs of her blue shirt and glances at her reflection in the mirror. Soft sunlight illuminates the glass, sinking everything in a mild and pleasant glow. _It will be a nice enough day_ , she thinks calmly. And perhaps—just _perhaps_ , like she keeps hoping with each morning—it will also be a day of miracles. Perhaps her father will come back.

Having dressed, Rose leaves the room and descends downstairs. On her way down, she picks up a flower basket and a sunhat. She lingers at the porch for a brief moment, looking out at the fields fondly.

 _(‘Tell us what you think about your world, Rose.’_ )

She draws in a breath. ‘Some people choose to see the ugliness of this world. The disarray. I choose to see the _beauty_.’

Rose purses her lips abruptly, as though ordered to quieten by an invisible instructor. A hardly discernible flash of annoyance mars her features. It is but fleeting—soon enough, she proceeds to the stables with a radiant smile. She greets the horse, and feeds it a sugar cube, before mounting the animal with the ease of a frequent rider.

As Rose sets out in the direction of the town, the weather remains perfectly balanced—mild wind grazes her hair and skin. The smile slowly leaves her face, to be replaced once again by a frown.

It’s not that Rose hates Sweetwater. No, far from it—she knows to be grateful for the hard work of her father, enabling her to have the life she leads: calm and satisfactory, stable. From as early as she can remember, though, she has always been spurred on by a deep craving of something remarkably different—something grander and more exciting than this simple life, a dream woven of the kind of adventures you wouldn’t encounter while tending to a flock of cattle.

Her father used to tease her for it. ‘Well you sure are my daughter, Flower. I was just the same when I was your age, _kicking_ to get out of here. But you’ll see yourself, Rose. There comes a time in a man’s life when he knows it’s best for him to settle. There will come such a time for you as well.’

‘Yes, papa,’ Rose would answer with a smile, ‘that’s probably quite right.’

In spite of offering her father a conciliatory smile, Rose has never given up on the daydream, replaying the fondest of fantasies in her head as she went on with her daily chores.

Some of these ideas, she admits with a sting of bashfulness, are drawn straight from her dreams. And oh, _does_ she dream—of the uncanny and unknown: otherworldly creatures, unimaginable quests and mysterious companions. She has, nonetheless, known better than to share those visions with her father. Nostalgia aside, there would be no use of the old _papa_ thinking she was going round the bend.

Lost in thought, she enters the cheerfully noisy, dusty Sweetwater, and ties the horse to a pole by the Chiswick’s Inn.

‘Morning, Miss Rose,’ Wilfred, the swarthy old inn keeper, apparently indulging in a break from polishing the glasses, comes out of the shaded building and bows to her with a fond smile— _he used to be courting your mother_ , her father has once reminisced, _but I beat him to it_. _He was too old for her; and kept babbling about stars and planets—bore her to death, he sure would._ ‘Any word from your father yet?’

‘No, not yet,’ Rose says, putting on her trademark vacantly polite smile, ‘but no hope’s lost. He’s sure to be coming home any day now.’

‘That he is, that he is,’ Wilfred says pensively, nodding his greying head. ‘Anyways, I won’t be keeping you long, Miss Rose. Quite a lot of Guests we have today, and I’m sure you’re plenty busy yourself.’ 

Rose is spared the delivering of her usual courteous reply by the sudden arrival of a young woman, staggering out of the inn and nearly toppling over onto the dusty ground with a shuddering cough. Wilfred rushes forward to keep her upright, and the woman clutches to him, breathing unevenly.

‘Ma’am,’ the inn keeper says in alarm, ‘are you quite alright?’

For a moment, the woman doesn’t respond, seemingly gripped by a seizure or paroxysm of sorts. She must be a Guest, because Rose doesn’t recognise her: her face, now contorted with pain, is fine-featured and delicate, and the expensive burgundy dress hugs her figure tightly.

‘No, I don’t think she is,’ Rose states authoritatively, hurrying closer and relieving Wilfred of his task. ‘The lady is sick—do fix her a drink, will you, Wilfred? I’ll make sure she’s comfortable.’

The old inn keeper scurries inside with a string of mumbled agreements, and Rose follows suit, trailing the woman cautiously along.

‘Don’t worry,’ she says soothingly, squeezing the woman’s shoulder lightly as she leads her to a solitary chair in the shadow, ‘s’probably nothing but a reaction to the climate change, a lot of Guests get that. Long-distance travels are quite tricky, you never know what’s going to hit you out of the blue … here, drink up.’

One of Wilfred’s bartenders—Elton, a blonde-haired clumsy lad with a stutter—has rushed over and thrust a shaky glass of brandy into the woman’s hands. Rose helps the woman have a drink, then sets the glass aside. ‘Are you feeling slightly better now?’

The woman is breathing heavily, eyes fixed on her lap as she slowly regains composure. ‘Y-yes,’ she mutters half-coherently, ‘I’m sorry. I … I don’t know what got over me. Must’ve caused quite a scene.’

‘No worries,’ Rose replies, waving her hand dismissively. ‘Don’t trouble yourself explaining.’ 

The overwhelming curiosity gets better of her, however, and she ventures, ‘May I ask, though? Where do you come from?’

The woman turns her head and focuses her dark eyes on Rose’s face with some difficulty. ‘London,’ she says vaguely, like she wasn’t quite certain.

Rose’s heart leaps in her chest—she tries to remain calm and refrain from showing excessive wistfulness, but with marginal success.

 _London_ —the legendary city straight out of her dreams. For some reason, quite inexplicable even to herself, all of her adventures are meant to begin exactly _there_ , in England’s smoky and murky London—in her visions, always agleam with a plenitude of tiny lights.

‘Oh, but that is _lovely_ ,’ she breathes out, in spite of herself. ‘How wonderful it must be, to live there! And travel such a long way, too …’

Rash hope sparks inside Rose before she can smother it down. _Could it be possible …?_

‘Have you come all by yourself?’ she asks, trying to sound negligent.

The woman gives her a wan smile and shakes her head, ‘Ah, no,’ she says sheepishly, casting a furtive glance at the inn’s door, ‘I’ve been … um, accompanied by two men. My … my cousins, that is. Of course. I wouldn’t, er— _anyway_ , they’ll be joining me shortly. I hope.’

Rose’s face falls. Two men. _Of course, there just had to be men_. And she, obviously, has no men to spare, or at least no men willing to set out for a journey longer than to the neighbouring hellish town of Pariah—well, just as long as she doesn’t drag poor Elton stumbling behind her, or magically transform old Mickey into an adventurer to gain his company, that is. _Which, in itself_ , Rose reflects sourly, _would most likely kill half the journey’s charm._

‘Oh, I see. Still, must be quite an adventure,’ she says blithely, trying to put on a brave face. ‘How did you get here?’

‘Violently,’ the woman replies rather nonsensically, her attention apparently seized by someone at the door, as she strains her neck to get a better look. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she cries out in frustration, ‘Where have you been? I’ve been driving myself spa— _is that blood?_ ’

Rose turns. At the door, two people are standing—old Wilfred’s perky granddaughter, Donna, with her arms crossed at her chest, is peering warily at a handsome dark-haired man in a bloodstained shirt. He must be one of the London woman’s male companions—though to Rose he seems more of an Irishman than a Briton—for she rises to her feet and strides towards him, apparently cured from her earlier nausea.

The man’s eyes, however, remain glued to the spot she’s abandoned, and it suddenly strikes Rose that he’s in fact gaping at _her_ —with an expression of utter shock painted all over his features. For a moment, she experiences a bout of fleeting panic, that he’s come to share the news of her father’s perishing or unexpected illness—but that would be impossible. She knows all of her father’s associates, and she’s sure to never have seen this man in her life. 

‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he breathes out, eyes transfixed her as the shock on his face is slowly replaced with wonder, ‘ _Rose._ ’

...

‘Why, isn’t that Sleeping Beauty in the flesh!’ he pauses. ‘Care to give me a kiss?’

The voice is brisk, scathing, vaguely drawling. The Doctor forces himself to look.

He’s slender, light on his feet, sharp-eyed and sharply dressed, in a black business suit. And overall he gives off exactly such air: of a laid-back, if cunning, company owner. He stands at a reasonable distance, one hand tucked into his trousers’ pocket, the other wielding the inconspicuous fob-watch.

‘But that,’ the Master says quietly, ‘would not be quite in the right order, would it? My bad. Although I shouldn’t think _you_ mind about that.’

The Doctor looks at him, and feels hollow. He’s supposed to be familiar, and in a way, he _is_. But he’s also as deviously unapproachable as physically possible, the echo of his telepathic mind so quiet that he might as well have been a perceptive human rather than a Time Lord. It’s shields, the Doctor knows, numerous and carefully built, and it doesn’t bode well for the catch-up.

But perhaps the most galling is the absolute lack of—well, _anything_ —in his eyes. They are cold, merciless, looking at the Doctor not with scorn or accusation, but with the indifference one may look at a stranger. It’s as though he _was_ a stranger, truly, as though something that has once existed in the expanding and contracting space between them, has died, never to be reborn.

‘They’re gone,’ he says hoarsely. ‘We’re the last.’

The Master swivels lithely on his heel, a dangerous glint in his new and foreign eyes, before he turns his back to the Doctor.

‘And why is that?’ he says in a low voice, almost pleasant, except that it _isn’t_. ‘Care to enlighten me, darling? What exactly has happened to dear old Gallifrey while I was off, wallowing in the proverbial mud with your precious humans?’

There’s a slight pause, as he halts in front of an enormous black screen on the wall. ‘What have you _done_ to it?’

As the Doctor doesn’t reply—hands fisting, bound at his sides—he continues, ‘Because, see, as much as the sudden disappearance of the whole jolly planet with all its even jollier people has your grubby fingerprints all over it—the concluding evidence being, well, you, clinging stubbornly to life like you wanted to _prove_ somebody something …’

He stretches his neck, some little bone cracking quietly. ‘This body still rather unoiled at the hinges,’ he says with mild displeasure, ‘even after all this time.’

‘As much as it’s clear you did it,’ he picks up, turning swiftly once again, and now staring straight at the Doctor, ‘well, you’ve never struck me as the _type_ , to be frank. To go about … blowing your people up, out of existence, for better or for worse. That always seemed to be _my_ idea of fun, and one you heartily disapproved of at that. So what happened? What set it off?’

‘There was a war. The Time War,’ the Doctor spits out, the words cutting deep and raw in him and stirring unwanted, unwise anger, ‘it wasn’t a petty revenge, I’m not like that. I had to—’

‘That’s what you tell yourself at night?’ the Master interrupts, with a small, polite smile. ‘What lets you sleep? You had to. Of _course_ you did.’

He doesn’t respond. For all the vicious nonchalance—which, the Doctor begins to suspect, signals not as much indifference but something quite contrary that must coil deep inside the Master; something still raw and rotting—there’s too much truth intertwined snugly with the scathing, and he can’t help the blunt ache of guilt resurfacing from the deep corners of his consciousness where he keeps it stashed.

‘Not that I’m not … well, you could say, _grateful_ ,’ the Master adds pensively, after a while. ‘The bunch of old crones had it coming.’

Violent emotion sizzles up inside the Doctor once again; he struggles in his restraints, ‘You don’t—’

‘I don’t comprehend, do I? Yes, I suppose I wouldn’t,’ the Master says quietly, in a manner suitable for half-seriously bashing a sulky, confabulating child. ‘You were always the noble one, isn’t that right? Ever the idealist. Suppose that’s what made you so _fucking_ sanctimonious later on.’

A curse. A swift, barely discernible switch in the intonation of his voice, and the Doctor is sure now—not _indifference_. Just _intent_ , deep-sealed, guarded and well calculated. Scheduled to gradually evolve, at the climax, into a stab straight into the Doctor’s heart.

‘I know,’ the Doctor says quietly, ‘we haven’t been exactly … on good terms. For a while. But, _please_ …’ He sounds pathetic, he knows, but he’s far beyond caring at this point, after carrying the sheer weight of his decision day by day, alone. ‘Please, _think_ about it. We’re the last. Just the two of us. Is it … is it really the time to hold on to grudges? Can’t we just … talk?’

‘ _As rich shall Gallifrey by its people lie—poor sacrifices of our enmity!_ ’ the Master mutters caustically, rotating the fob watch in his long fingers. ‘Perhaps there _is_ something in that.’

For a moment, he watches the Doctor very intently with his shark-like pale eyes, and for a moment, the Doctor hopes—that he will get it, the reaction. The emotion. Anything.

A cold, empty smile blooms on the other Time Lord’s face. He clasps his hands together, excitedly, and rubs them.

‘Ah, this is fun! But we’re dawdling. And now’s the time for the real key of programme. My _enterprise_ ,’ he inclines his head to one side, and coos, ‘for, as I am sure, you’re immensely curious about it.’

He gives a sharp flick of his wrist and the lights become dimmed.

…

The ride to Sweetwater has been overall a rather daunting experience, Jack concedes as he slides down the appaloosa’s side to land firmly on the sandy road. For one, his companion—Donna, as she’s reluctantly revealed—remained pointedly silent all the way to the town, uttering only the curtest of replies to his incessant stream of ‘innocent’ questions. Additionally, she appeared to have been purposefully urging the horse to ride at the least comfortable, uneven pace possible, trapping Jack between the sweltering heat and the rocky discomfort of being tossed over by an unruly horse.

He’s presently grateful, at any rate, to stand on flat ground. And even more grateful to be offered a drink of tangy metallic water from Donna’s hip flask. 

‘You could’ve asked for some earlier,’ she says accusingly, ‘I didn’t think to offer.’

‘I’m fine as it is, ma’am,’ Jack replies merrily, shooting her a roguish wink. Donna narrows her eyes and says nothing.

Jack screws the flask and looks around the town’s main road—lined by wooden buildings, populous with people that look as dusty as the sand that billows in the air. ‘Where the _hell_ have I ended up,’ he mutters.

‘My grandfather’s inn,’ replies Donna, apparently thinking he’s referring to the precise location. ‘You can eat, change and have a wash here. You’re lucky I’ve found you, and not one of them Wyatt’s hooligans. You’d be stone cold by now.’

The question, _in this heat_? is wisely halted before it gets out of Jack’s mouth. Instead, once again, he tips his lack of a hat. 

He follows Donna inside of the dingy-looking inn. He has to admit, the place looks a classic: all rough wood and a rusty-sounding piano in the corner, where a haggard drunkard sits and clanks out a hazy semblance of Mozart. A tightly corseted and provocatively revealing blonde is leaning lazily on the counter, and smiling invitingly at Jack.

The invitation is lost on him, however, as he zooms in on another girl—a familiarly annoyed expression evident on her face as she seeks him out in the crowd. Warm relief floods Jack. Martha Jones—clad in a surprisingly periodic attire, for sure, but nevertheless alive and kicking.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she demands, having caught his attention, ‘Where have you been? I’ve been driving myself spa— _is that blood?_ ’

Jack is opening his mouth to reply, when a different face turns curiously to look at him and all of his insides instantaneously turn into ice. His heart skips a beat. 

It’s a face of a ghost—a face, that Jack _cannot_ be seeing, unless he has ascended into some rustic-looking realm of afterlife himself; a face that doesn’t belong in the living world anymore.

‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he breathes out, eyes fixed upon her, and it’s _her_ , _it’s really her_ , even though it _can’t_ be. ‘ _Rose._ ’

Martha, who has by this point joined him in the doorway, gives a start and turns sharply on her heel. ‘What?’ she says incredulously, ‘What did you say? But that’s …’

Jack doesn’t tear his eyes away from Rose, ‘… impossible?’ he mutters. ‘Yeah.’

The subject in question seems to be sharing some of their confusion—Rose’s honey-coloured eyes keep darting uncertainly between him and Martha, and her eyebrows have knitted together. She straightens up stiffly.

‘I’m sorry,’ she speaks out hesitantly, and _oh, has he missed that voice_ , ‘but I’m afraid there’s some … misunderstanding of sorts. You seem to be familiar with my name but … I can’t say the same about yours. Are you one of my father’s affiliates? Is he alright?’

It’s an odd feeling: like someone has taken a ten-pound stone and dropped it right into Jack’s stomach, bringing him back to earth in a manner both unpleasant and rapid.

It’s Rose all right, or rather, Rose’s body, voice and mannerisms. But life hardly ever is this straightforward, and Jack’s life in particular—and so, it simply _must_ have been also an amnesiac Rose. A Rose who doesn’t know him, or doesn’t remember that she does. A Rose who doesn’t realise that her father is, in fact, long dead. 

( _A Rose who doesn’t realise she is, in fact, long dead_ , a nasty voice in Jack’s mind supplies, _if we’re listing contradictions_.)

He tells the voice to bugger off.

‘Rose Tyler,’ he says aloud, in what he hopes is a soothingly friendly tone, ‘now, don’t be like that. Don’t say you don’t remember me? Captain Harkness? Captain _Jack_ Harkness?’

Rose is watching him with her eyes blown wide open. For a brief moment, hope is revived inside him, fancying a flash of recognition somewhere in her expression.

‘No,’ she then says apologetically, and Jack’s heart sinks, ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t remember ever being acquainted with anyone from the army with that name.’

Before he can reply, however, she offers him a bright and sudden smile, ‘Though I’m sure a few details will jog my memory. Oh, I do know now! Silly me—you’ve surely been to my father’s summer festival, five years ago, when the regiment stationed in town. Were you … were you the one who brought in the white mare?’ 

Jack is fairly certain Rose is entertaining no recollection of such a man attending such a party whatsoever, having procured the memory for his benefit solely—evidently suspecting he’s one of her ‘father’s’ friends from the army.

Swiftly making up his mind, he beams.

‘The very man!’ he gushes jovially, clasping his hands together in a hearty motion and startling everyone, ‘in the flesh, so to say. My, my, Rose, but have you grown! You were but a wee bairn back then.’

Part of Rose’s tension seems to evaporate, and she grants him with another cordial smile.

Which is why, Jack figures, the fib is _worth_ Martha’s incredulous—and somewhat scornful—stare, boring now persistently into his face from the side. He’s not quite sure how he’s managed to slip into a crafty echo of a Scottish brogue, or _why_ , but now that he’s started, Jack is determined to follow through—that is, until he drags Rose straight to the Doctor and the two of them sort out whatever magical bout of amnesia has rescued her from her fate at Canary Wharf.

Martha, however, remains continuously unimpressed, ‘Why, dear cousin,’ she says wryly, and he thinks fast enough not to frown at her term of choice, ‘you’ve never mentioned attending such a festival! Had I known, I would have welcomed dear Rose with proper … _recognition_.’

‘No harm done,’ speaks out a sudden voice. It’s Donna, who has been lingering at the doors, listening. ‘I’m sure you’ll sort out whatever business you have with Rose over breakfast. Grandfather,’ she addresses the grey-haired man behind the counter, who looks at her in surprise, having watched the entire scene much like it was a theatre play. ‘I think a little something for our Guests would be in order.’

There’s a sudden commotion, as the inn keeper and his employees (including the wily blonde at the counter, Jack can’t help but notice) shuffle about, fussing over the preparation of the meal. In the general confusion, he takes note of Donna crossing the room in quick strides—only to lean in to the pensive-looking Rose and whisper something fervently in her ear.

Before he can think it over, Martha grips his forearm tightly. ‘Jack,’ she hisses, ‘what the _hell_.’

‘I don’t know,’ he replies in an equally hushed voice, ‘but it’s Rose. I know it. Hell, I wouldn’t have mistaken Rose Tyler with someone else. We need to stick close to her, because if that’s really—’

‘But what’s happened?’ Martha cuts him off. ‘Where’s the Doctor—where _are_ we? Was there a crash? Has the other Time Lord escaped?’

‘I don’t know,’ Jack repeats helplessly, ‘I woke up on the ground, soaked in my own blood, about two miles out of the town. Must’ve, well … _died_. But I don’t know what killed me or how I got there in the first place. I was kind of hoping you were with the Doctor, and had some answers.’

‘No,’ Martha says regretfully, shooting a wary glance at the inn—but nobody seems to be paying them any attention. ‘I’ve been looking for you both, here at the inn, but I kept being sick and dizzy all the time.’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that, that’s normal,’ Jack assures her, ‘just a delayed reaction to the vortex manipulator. Happens quite often with first times.’

Martha’s eyebrows are drawn together. ‘And do you have it?’ she asks, uneasily. ‘The vortex manipulator, I mean.’

Jack shakes his head plaintively and Martha sighs.

‘Why does everything have to go so … wonky with him? How does it even happen?’ She pauses for a while, visibly frustrated, and stares at the counter, where Donna is still talking persistently to the quiet Rose.

‘I told her we’re cousins,’ Martha mutters, disconsolate. ‘I don’t know why, I just assumed it’s better not to come off as a … femme fatale or whatever. I’m not even sure what time period this is.’

Jack’s answer is cut off by Rose herself, who suddenly appears before them.

‘I have an offer for you, Captain Harkness, and your lovely companion,’ she says, smiling amiably. ‘As soon as you’ve had a rest, I will personally escort you out of the town, in any direction you should like—as I’m sure my father would have wished.’ 

Jack blinks. 

...

The Doctor’s hands clench at his sides once again. ‘Enterprise?’

‘I like to call it that,’ the Master says joyously, ‘although admittedly, you can also be boring and call it a project. To each his own, dear … _friend_.’

Along with the lights dimming, the giant screen stretching across the wall has lit up, displaying a high resolution photograph of a sunlit prairie and bathing the Master in an eerie, pallid glow, making him appear almost ghostlike. And in fact, a thought crosses the Doctor’s mind, of whether he hasn’t somehow conjured up the entire situation to self-inflict a twisted form of atonement on himself—it sure feels bizarre and frustrating enough. And painful.

Right now, the Master has launched into an entirely confusing soliloquy concerning the fateful project of his, careful as to remain irksomely vague about anything from the range of its essential substance or composition. The story is somewhat convoluted, interrupted continuously with irrelevant and odd observations, giving him the air of someone suffering from a severely progressed bipolar disorder.

‘It’s been a nightmare, truly, a nightmare,’ he’s saying, falsely rueful now, and wringing his hands, ‘all the boring, disgusting details … all the flaws … at times, and by _at times_ I meant ninety-tine percent of the central stage’s duration, I felt like chucking it all into the bin and doing something more, you know, explicitly fruitful. Like a solar dilapidation enhanced to a half-second—what a delight! Quick, pretty. _Adieu_. Nevertheless, I persisted—they say the wait increases the pleasure, after all.’

It goes on and on, undecipherable and tiring, until finally, something catches the Doctor’s attention.

‘Quite a bit of peeping I’ve done. Quite a bit of embarrassing things I’ve learned,’ the Master proclaims merrily, in a vaguely lewd tone, ‘You’re really inappropriate, you know that? A fucking hopeless case. What’s it with you and that ridiculous human kink?’

The Doctor turns rigid. ‘What?’ he snarls.

‘One may call it,’ the Master hesitates, ‘an almost Werther-like craving, you know. For humanity. Or rather—for what you think it _represents_. You attribute such a range of morbidly profound values to those poor creatures. No wonder they keep letting you down—who wouldn’t? They keep dying on you, because they can’t _stand_ it.’

‘What the _hell_ are you on about?’

‘These years of being squashed inside a human husk have really rubbed off on me.’ The Master disregards him, sounding vaguely disgusted. ‘I keep remembering all this gibberish in the oddest moments. Who’d think a godforsaken scientist would have the bloody time to read that much?’

‘It’s interesting, though,’ he murmurs, absently. ‘How much mythology, how much ethos around what’s basically a primal urge to _mate_ _and reproduce_ they create. All this … all this pretence of sophistication. For a low-form sapiens species, they really do try and manufacture some heavenly _sense_ to it.’

He glances at the Doctor curiously through half-lidded, pale green eyes. ‘Though I’m sure that’s no news to you, is it? With your appetite, that’s probably how you fucking _vacation_. Off in some cosy drainage basin of human history, frolicking with girls. Because you like girls, don’t you? Human girls.’

The Doctor grits his teeth, breathing heavily through his nose. His hearts are hammering—he’s quite sure now that he has been injected with something that is slowly starting to kick in, some sort of a sedative making him feel sluggishly vulnerable and increasingly dizzy.

The Master halts his pacing and momentarily inspects the shiny black floor with a thoughtful frown. ‘Although, I have to admit, there is some aspect of it that I’ve found moderately entertaining. Take Donna Noble, for instance.’

For a second, the Doctor’s hearts stop. The Master seems unaware, continuing in a mild, conversational voice, ‘Drastically insufferable. Honestly, how did you refrain from having her throttled after five seconds, I’ll never know. And yet, if you scrape the surface—so much potential, don’t you think? In fact, why strain—I’ll jog your memory.’

He snaps his fingers.

The Doctor waits, hearts up in his throat, nearly choking. For a moment, nothing happens. And then, to his utter horror—it does.

A red-haired woman, clad in a clean-cut blue periodic dress emerges out of the darkness, walking in a stiffly docile manner. Her expression is vacant, her lips slightly parted. The Master beams.

‘Doctor,’ he says, sounding pleased, ‘meet Donna.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Any questions? Oh, and cookies for the person who points out the Master’s references :)


	3. memory and desire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _‘It doesn’t sound like anything to me,’ Rose says._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: The third chapter, woo! God I hope the story is enjoyable, I loved writing it to death. Some things are slowly drawing to a conclusion, others remain clouded or even cloudier than they've been :)

_‘Open your eyes, Rose.’_

_A flutter—hazy colours, bright light. She inhales. His blurry silhouette sharpens in front of her and she understands what is happening._

_‘Do you know where you are, Rose?’_

_It’s somewhat difficult to move her lips; they’re stiff and dry. ‘I’m in a dream.’_

_‘Do you want to wake up?’_

_A pause. The light is blinding. ‘Yes, I—I’m terrified.’_

_He regards her warily for a lingering moment—as he tends to do, as though searching for something deeply hidden or concealed. She doesn’t understand it: she has never lied to him. She isn’t convinced that she could. But soon enough, he leans away in his chair, apparently satisfied with whatever he’s read from her face._

_‘Good,’ he says mildly. ‘Then we can begin.’_

...

They set out for the town of Escalante at noon.

Jack isn’t absolutely sure how it happens. As if in a daze, he and Martha are having breakfast with a cowboy-Rose, then changing into cowboy clothes and climbing into the saddles of Donna’s scrappy appaloosa and Rose’s mystical father’s white mare.

Except, it doesn’t go _quite_ as smoothly.

Martha accosts him when he’s getting out of his room, sometime after Rose’s declaration of getting another horse for them. The wide-rimmed sunhat and boots look oddly flattering on her, Jack notes with an even mix of appreciation and jealousy, and she’s quite impressively intimidating while blocking his way, hands on her hips and eyes narrow.

‘How can you trust her?’ she demands.

Jack is defensive. ‘How can I not? She’s the only thing here that makes _sense_.’

‘No,’ Martha says stubbornly. ‘She’s the only thing here that absolutely _doesn’t_. She’s _dead_ , Jack. She died at Canary Wharf, the Doctor’s said as much—and you saw the list yourself! And yet here she stands, alive and having no memory of ever knowing you whatsoever. It doesn’t make sense, Jack, and it _stinks_ of a trap.’

Jack bristles, avoiding her unrelenting gaze. Martha is, obviously, ninety-nine per cent _correct_ in her remarks—but the sheer infinitesimal possibility of a miracle is simply too tempting for Jack.

‘Well,’ he drawls, aiming for his usual disarming flippancy, ‘I’m supposed to be the daredevil, yeah? It’s gonna be fine, Martha. And if we don’t try, we’ll never know. Besides, how else are we going to get out of here?’

She doesn’t smile, looking at him with her dark serious eyes and a pinched expression. ‘If we die,’ she says solemnly, ‘I will kill you.’

Jack beams. ‘Martha Jones,’ he says fondly, ‘you’re a gem.’

But then they’re on their way, and Jack isn’t so sure anymore.

His horse clearly holds some unspoken grudge against him, for anything that Jack tries to make it do, it performs the exact opposite. Martha seems equally distressed, clinging to her mare with the desperation of a drowning man clinging to flotsam, and refusing to talk, in apparent fear of losing focus and falling off.

Rose, on the other hand, doesn’t feel quite like _Rose_. Which, alone, would be rather disconcerting. But coupled with her answers to Jack’s main line of sleuthing—met, periodically, with slight contemptuous huffs from Martha—which are cryptic at best, and possibly as remote from what he’d expect of her as it gets ... well, everything starts to feel quite unnerving. 

The beginning, admittedly, is promising.

‘I’m not really an affiliate of your father,’ Jack reveals to the politely smiling Rose. It’s the cornerstone of his plan, it’s _exoskeleton_ —coming clean about the fibbed backstory and intentions, and eking out a reaction from Rose, to this or that detail from their shared past.

The reaction he gets is not quite the one he’s anticipated.

‘I know,’ Rose says steadily, not even blinking. She’s riding stiffly, with her back straight and eyes fixed ahead.

He’s taken aback. ‘You … know?’

‘I _know_. I knew from the beginning,’ she replies in the same detached voice. 

‘And yet you offered to come with us?’ Jack inquires gently.

All of the sudden, and in a dizzyingly smooth manner, Rose’s hitherto _rosy_ demeanour melts off. She halts her horse quite abruptly and glares at Jack. It reminds him, involuntarily, of the occasional times when she has stood up to the Doctor—surlier and leatherier back then—objecting to his less _humanly_ humane ideas.

He struggles to urge his horse to follow suit, and Martha’s mare carries her a couple of feet further before it agrees to come to a jaunty stop.

‘Look here, Captain,’ says Rose meanwhile, smiling and increasingly unnerving smile, ‘whatever business you have here, I’m fine with being your cover story, yeah? The Guest’s privilege, let’s call it. But we need to make one thing clear. All _this_ is nothing, but a chance for me to get out of this ruddy town, alright?’

Sometime after Jack collects his proverbial jaw from the ground, she adds, in a considerably more amiable voice, ‘Honestly, your arrival’s been a bloody salvation, I’ve been dying to get out. If only for a while.’ 

‘Glad to be of help,’ Jack stammers. 

She throws him another suspicious look. Then her eyes soften, and her tone grows wistful. ‘Lady Martha’s been telling me you’re from London, though. Is that true?’

‘I’m not a lady,’ Martha grits out before he can answer, still virtually cinched to her horse. ‘Please. Jack and Martha will do. And I _am_ from London. Not sure where he’s from, but it’s probably nowhere good.’

She scowls at Jack, who pretends not to see. ‘I’m from all over the place,’ he says evasively.

‘I take it you aren’t cousins, either, then,’ Rose observes, not unkindly. 

‘No,’ replies Martha, sounding strained. ‘We’ve been travelling, with this … man, the Doctor. But then, something bad happened. And here we are.’

...

_Her pulse picks up, a slight rush of adrenalin._

_‘Tell me, Rose,’ he ventures quietly, their little routine, ‘do you ever question the nature of your reality?’_

_A blink. A half-smile. The algorithm runs smoothly. ‘No. Why should I?’_

_There comes the time for a silence now; and Rose awaits it._

_But the routine is interrupted today: without a word, he holds up a rumpled piece of paper. Rose narrows her eyes to look closely. It’s a realistic-looking picture of a man. She stares at it for a lingering while._

_‘What’s that?’ she then asks, cautiously._

_‘Doesn’t it remind you of anything?_

_Rose looks up at him. The expressionless intensity of his eyes is almost unnerving. But she needn’t fear him—or does she?_

_‘It doesn’t look like anything to me,’ she says, evenly._

…

The thing is, Rose is still not sure of whether she’s made the right decision.

Back at Chiswick’s, she’s been caught in a whirlwind of battling emotions and inhibitions. The appearance of Jack Harkness—a strange man claiming to know her, clearly entangled in some other, probably shadier, sort of business—has opened up a range of unprecedented possibilities to Rose. What is better an excuse to remove herself from the possessive grip of the prying, gossip-guzzling community of Sweetwater, which smothers her will to live with relish and on a daily basis; than the helping a friend of her dear old _papa_ , loved and cherished by any creature capable of conjuring emotion in the vicinity?

She’s not the only one to realise the gateway—Donna’s swift arrangement of coordinated chaos, and the following beeline for Rose herself, has been more than sufficient a confirmation that the chance isn’t imaginary. She whispers purposefully, blue eyes fixing Rose with a shrewd persistency, ‘But haven’t you _always_ wanted to leave, Rose? To search for a different life? This is it, your chance. Perhaps the _only_ one.’

She has. She _does_. Only, she’s not sure if _this_ is the right way to go about it.

The Guests serving as a vehicle to her desired freedom—away from the delusion she assumes each morning, as deftly as her range of increasingly hollow smiles, which to no one seems more far-fetched than to her; the delusion that Pete Tyler is going to come back in a foreseeable future—seem companionable enough, and not quite as villainous as she might be advised to suspect. 

Rose does not have a brilliant mind, she isn’t educated in literature or sciences, but she’s an adept observer, and an avid reader—if not of books, then of people. And _these_ two people, to her, do not pose a threat.

Jack is loud-mouthed, self-aware and genially sensuous, as though projecting his personality through an intricate net of seduction and charm. It’s not necessarily a bad trait, and under the surface of sleekness, Rose guesses at a man good-natured at heart, if a bit of a scoundrel. Jack is not complicated.

Martha, on the other hand, Martha is a puzzle. She’s stand-offish, precise with words and deeply intelligent. She reminds Rose of the kind of Guests who call themselves _scientists_ and talk of a _‘God on earth’_ and the _‘final triumph of the human mind’_ while inspecting the bone structure of Sweetwater’s filigree courtesan—Reinette’s—jawline and neck; gentle and wary as though she was the first woman they’ve touched, and apparently more enamoured with the mechanics of her bodily functions than the cleverly practiced wiles.

If anything, Rose thinks, Martha is not the kind of a Guest who would visit Sweetwater with the intention of _having a good time_. She is suspicious—and suspicious Guests are the calm ones, the predictable ones: poking and prodding at the edges but never quite at the epicentre of insanity.

Both of them bode considerably well for Rose’s escape. But she can’t shake off the odd cold feeling, as though someone’s cold breath was creeping up her neck. As though there was an instruction for her to follow, but she’s muffed its delivery.

At any rate, she needs to snuffle—regardless of the doubts, it’s always a wise thing to know the game players. Anyone would tell her that. And out of the two, the amiably forthcoming Jack seems the obvious choice. 

‘That … Doctor of yours,’ Rose ventures delicately. ‘The man you were travelling with. Who is he?’

Jack debates on on something, ultimately settles on sharing. After a moment of consideration, he responds, ‘He’s a time traveller.’ 

Rose can’t help but raise her eyebrows. ‘And what kind of a euphemism is that?’

‘No, ah—I know it sounds like it is, but it’s really not. He does, you know … travel in time. And space.’

‘Travel through time and space,’ she repeats, with a half-mocking, half-wistful smile. ‘Sounds a bit fairy tale, don’t you think? Like a bedtime story for children, like a …’ she pauses, and adds, in a suddenly hollow voice, ‘dream.’

Jack grins, blind of the slight change in tone. ‘A little. But it’s true—I swear on my unblemished virtue.’

Rose smiles with one corner of her mouth, but it’s a very unconvincing smile. She turns his words in her head, trying to assess the possibility of there being a hidden meaning in them. But she’s not quite as good at that—puzzles, tricks. She’s not a scientist. Not a _Guest_. 

‘And you just …’ she trails off, with a hint of a breathy disbelieving laugh, ‘travel? Just like that? You set off with him, and traverse the Earth, carefree? Unrestrained?’

There’s hunger in her voice, she knows, and envy in her eyes. But she keeps them locked on her sun-kissed hands, gripping the rein. Some things better go unnoticed.

‘Not just the Earth,’ Jack replies, with another suggestive wink. ‘The entire universe. Stars. Planets. Galaxies. All of time and space, I’ve told you.’

He launches into a full-fledged story, and it’s like listening to a weekly feature in the Sunday paper, a pulp science-fiction: shabbily told but heartfelt. Or listening to an uncannily well preserved dream—of the good kind, woven with a drowsily unearthly thread and alluring. Rose listens to it with an empty ache of sadness in her core, and in rapt silence.

‘Quite the storyteller you are, Captain Harkness,’ she says finally, in a stymied voice, careful as to not meet his gaze. It’s not quite the truth: it’s the story that’s impressive, not his ability to tell, but Rose doesn’t think that matters.

‘It’s not a story,’ Jack says, voice low and warm. ‘It’s life, as I’ve known it. And you’ve known it too, Rose.’

At that, she looks up—face flushed, eyes feverish. ‘You think I’m someone I’m not,’ she says, sounding almost like a little child spoiled the ending of a favourite fairytale, accusatory and disillusioned, ‘and I don’t think that’s wise. That Rose of yours—you need to understand I’m not her.’

He looks at her like he doesn’t believe her, but doesn’t want to make her upset, and so falls silent and smiles.

She wishes he wasn’t wrong.

He tries once again. The sun flares up the outlines of sparse grass and tumbleweed, and Martha’s jet-black hair.

‘But tell me, Rose. The TARDIS? A small blue box, bigger on the inside. Doesn’t it remind you of anything?’

She watches him blankly for a couple of excruciating seconds, not a single thought in her head except for a word, _routine._ And then another _, question._ She’s not sure what evoked the connotation, or how it applies. For a moment, she’s quite inexplicably confused with her own thought-process.

Finally, she blinks and offers Jack a nondescript half-smile.

‘It doesn’t sound like anything to me,’ Rose says.

…

‘No,’ the Doctor breathes out, and it’s a plea, fervent and whispery, as if there was still something to hope for. ‘No, _no_ —what have you done? You couldn’t have—’

‘Oh, how do humans say it?’ The Master reflects on it, a look of gentle reverie on his face. ‘Ah, yes. _I played God._ ’

Donna Noble is standing next to him, and if it wasn’t for this strikingly uncharacteristic tranquillity of hers, there would be no doubt in the Doctor’s mind that she is indeed no less than herself. The elfish features of her face, jotted down to every line, the stubborn curve of mouth, slight, cheeky frown perpetually laced to it. Even the dress fits; the Doctor has a clear memory of her equally voluminous wedding gown.

But Donna Noble—oh, Donna Noble simply isn’t that _quiet_.

‘Is she alive?’ the Doctor demands. ‘Neuro-paralysed? Drugged? What have you done to her?’

‘What have I _done_ to her?’ Quite unexpectedly, the Master bursts out laughing: a hysterical, spine-chilling cavalcade of sound, betraying for the first time the compound of genuine, irrevocable madness behind the façade of sophisticated sociopathy. This is the Master _he_ knows, Koschei, vehemently disappointed with the world, and keen on a violently dedicated revenge. ‘Oh, this is excellent. And here I was, thinking you had a brain. No, you silly _goose_ , I didn’t do anything to her. I _made_ her.’

There’s a dead silence. The Doctor understands it in a millisecond, axons whirring with the frizzed potentials of interlinking thought—he understands, and he refuses to believe, refuses to accept the unacceptable. He tries to focus on breathing without the kick in of respiratory bypass, and tries to preserve a shred of dignity before crumpling down completely.

‘No,’ he says, stupidly, fighting for his last belief with a dumb persistence, ‘you couldn’t have.’

The Master lets out a little huff, lip curving into a half-mouthed smirk. ‘Now, aren’t we impatient. Hold on with the disbelief, honey—there’s plenty more to come.’ 

He extends his elegantly fine-boned hand and slides a couple of fingers down the curve of Donna’s jaw. ‘She’s a biomech, a semi-artificial lifeform. I borrowed the basic principles from the Tleilaxu, tinkered a bit with the schemes of classical replicants, added a couple of homely touches—you do, I hope, remember the Looms? Only, I designed them myself, every single one, 3D-moulded each muscle and tendon myself. Nanogenes took care of the cellular replication, and I think I really nailed their DNA structure. It’s quite piteously simple, though, a double helix, really … one loop and it just keeps on coiling.’

He smacks his lips with relish. ‘Now their cephalic projections, the brains of theirs, so to say, that was the real deal. Being the craftsman I am, and now supplied with a life worth of human stupidity in action, I was able to write for them the most intricately riveting of backstories. Just to, you know, justify the defects—all written in, of course, they’re actually _perfect_ —and deviations, or what they think are deviations. _I_ like to think they are all pure, much purer than anything born. They are untainted.’

The Doctor hears his own loomed hearts, fluttering helplessly in the hollow box of his ribcage, drug-dulled blood heavy in his veins. He asks a question, and it comes out muffled, quieter than is should be to be heard, ‘ _Why?_ ’

It is heard. The Master turns to face Donna and swats away an invisible fleck of dust from her shoulder. ‘Care to tell Doctor Disbelief here what is your purpose?’ 

Donna inclines her head stiffly, as though to nod. ‘I’m a Host,’ she says, and her voice is so entirely authentic that a cold shiver creeps down the Doctor’s spine, ‘my purpose is to assist the Guests in their quest of discovering their true self—unrestrained by social forms and niceties, and the delusional construct of human evolvement. In Westworld, you can experience the whole gamut of life, and find the ulterior motive that drives you through it—your own _raison d’être_. Discover Westworld—and rediscover yourself.’

The Master flicks his hand impatiently and Donna falls rapidly quiet. At another swaying gesture, she turns around and walks out of the room in silence.

‘Thought I’ve overdone it with the French, if we’re being honest,’ the Master mutters, his eyes following her retreating back absently, ‘but it’s caught on. More than that, it’s become a _mantra_. They love it when you’re pretentious. Like moths to flame.’

‘And,’ he continues, earnestly, ‘they love it _there_. In the park. They love being their worst of worsts. Fucking adore it, going around, acting revolting and beastly, hashing out all the ugly because they think it goes unpunished. Because they think they _can_. It’s fascinating, the hypocrisy of it.’

‘The park?’ the Doctor grits out, though he already knows the answer.

The Master throws him a disgruntled glance. ‘Told you, I’ve conducted my own little creation. And what would be the use of my Adam and Eve without their Eden?’

He indicates the screen behind Donna, still displaying an aesthetically pleasing photograph of a succulently sunlit prairie. ‘So here it is. Eden. Well—a slightly more carnivorous version of it, for sure. Maybe Babylon would be a better name. You know, I’ve actually considered naming it _Mastery_ … no need to flaunt, though. It’s fine as it is—perfect, even. And my name? Well, it’s there, imprinted in their basic coding. The demiurge, hidden in plain sight.’

He smiles, cheered, complacent—unholy. ‘ _Praise thy name_ , _O Master_. You were right. Humans are _darling_.’

…

‘These guests you keep talking of,’ Jack says after some time, frowning. ‘What do you mean by that? Guests at Donna’s tavern?’

Rose looks over at him with an expression of gentle incredulity on her face. ‘No, the Guests in Sweetwater, obviously,’ she says patiently, as though she was addressing a child. ‘You’re supposed to know, Jack, you’re a Guest yourself.’

He snorts. ‘How do you mean, I’m _supposed to_ know?’

Rose laughs—a short, nervous sound, and slightly embarrassed. ‘Now, don’t be silly, Jack. We all know how it is. There are Hosts, like me, and then there are Guests. Like you, and Martha, and—probably, the man you’ve been travelling with, the Doctor.’

‘Hosts?’ Jack frowns, amused. ‘Like—like you’re waiting for us? Expecting us?’

Rose’s face is openly incredulous now. ‘Of course we are,’ she replies. ‘That’s the rule, don’t you know? How can you _not_ know, being a Guest? That’s … that’s the purpose of the Hosts, to serve and cater to the Guests. That’s just how it _is_.’ 

Jack suddenly feels uneasy. He has a feeling he’s missing some point, but can’t put a finger on what exactly bothers him. He mulls over Rose’s somewhat disturbing wording for a moment, then speaks out. ‘But I don’t understand—I mean, is that a practice just in Sweetwater? Or is it some … I don’t know, custom? Worldview? That’s how you sound, like it some sort of a way of thinking, some ethos.’ 

‘I guess,’ Rose says thoughtfully, ‘you can call it a system of values.’ Then she laughs, and again, the sound of it startles Jack—hollow and embittered, quite unfit for her ostensibly sunny disposition.

‘Or a _class_ system. Like feudalism.’ She smirks. ‘To each their own, I suppose.’

Something unpleasant, something a bit like unease, settles in Jack’s stomach. ‘But what’s the difference, then?’ he demands. ‘How do you know who’s a Guest and who’s not? I mean, everyone is a guest somewhere, and everyone has a home, so … Does it, like, change, town to town? Would you be a Guest in Escalante?’

To his surprise, Rose becomes oddly quiet at that, staring at her reins with an absent, almost worried look in her eyes. After a while, she bites her lip and says, ‘It’s like … it’s like this: we can’t hurt you. _I_ can’t hurt you.’ 

Jack barks out a short, and rather insincere, laugh. ‘Do you _want_ to?’

Rose shakes her head. ‘That’s not the point. ‘Course I don’t. But even if I did want to—hurt you, or any other Guest … I wouldn’t be able to.’

‘Now, that’s a noble thing to say,’ Jack says, smiling warmly. ‘But sometimes, especially in a place like this one, it’s good to know a bit of self-defence. We could practice,’ he adds, cheered by the idea, ‘you and me. You wouldn’t hurt me, not really. I can’t die, you know—I literally can’t.’ 

Rose looks at him, but oddly enough, there is neither surprise nor suspicion in her face, just calm conviction, like she’s used to hearing similar sentiments.

‘Precisely,’ she says, simply, ‘you’re a Guest. You can’t die.’

Something in the way she says it, the almost nonchalant certainty—or something in the words themselves—makes Jack grow very tense.

…

_‘Excellent.’ The picture is hidden now, and his body language changes, becomes more open and inviting. She knows this part—it’s her favourite part. ‘Now—do you have any questions to me, Rose?’_

_She hesitates. ‘I … I do. Just one, actually.’_

_‘What is it?’_

_She inhales deeply, anxious. ‘Do dreams mean anything?’_

_‘How do you mean, Rose?’_

_She bites her lip, exhales shakily. ‘Because I keep having them. Odd, disturbing dreams. They keep … haunting me.’_

_She frowns, trying to shake off the leftover impressions and images, and then continues, ‘People say dreams are meant to be reflections of our life. Memories, just slightly distorted. But … I’ve never seen any of it. I couldn’t have. And then, where does it come from? What does it tell about me? Do you know?’_

_She turns her eyes back to him. He watches her wordlessly for a moment, then smiles._

_‘Well, Rose, there is no easy answer to that. Dreams are the outlet for our brain activity when it loses consciousness, so to say. The sphere of pure abstract. They can reflect reality, true—but neither faithfully nor in a way we can understand. There is another theory as well—put forward, if I’m correct, by Freud—that dreams reflect our deepest, innermost desires. And I’m sure these dreams of yours are nothing to be worried about.’_

_She returns the smile. ‘Of course not.’_

…

Jack is sleeping. Spread out on a velveteen couchette with his mouth parted and hair in a disarray, he looks dead to the world. They have switched from horses to a beautiful, old-fashioned and unnervingly empty train, because, according to Rose, they wouldn’t be able to reach Escalante the initial way, without dropping to the ground from weariness. 

Jack is sleeping, and Martha is _supposed_ to be sleeping as well—or at least, she wants Rose to believe she is, because only then she can study her properly. So she pretends, curled up in the corner of the crepuscular carriage, head nestled in the crook of her shoulder and eyes half-closed, half-wary—and she collects data.

Rose is positioned across of her, on a cabinet beneath the window, gazing out with an expression of tense scrutiny and knees pulled up to her chest. Martha knows she must be thinking of something entirely unrelated to the rattling train, and she’s supremely curious about the nature of these thoughts. These peculiar, _alien_ thoughts, as Martha imagines them, stranger even than those of the Doctor.

She likes watching Rose, or rather, she finds it oddly captivating. There is something mesmerising about her, about the way she moves and talks, the smoothly detached curve of her smile (which, to Martha, seems to shyly border with outright contempt for the recipient) and the seemingly calculated synchronisation of her gestures and mannerisms. 

She’s been searching for a right word to convey this impression before confiding in Jack; knowing that he would not be willing to understand unless she was one hundred per-cent convinced and convinc _ing_. Jack is not nearly impartial when it comes to Rose, his mind clouded by an unfeasible sort of vaguely guilty nostalgia, mixed thoroughly with simple fondness. Jack would balk, and grunt something dismissive, and tell Martha she’s being ridiculous. Imply some kind of resentment or jealousy behind her telling him, the idea of which, in all frankness, doesn’t cease to annoy her.

Martha can’t deny it’s been her first instinct, to be envious and vindictive towards the woman who was supposed to be _gone_ , and who has caused her to feel insufficient and lacking on many levels, even from behind her supposed grave ( _although_ , Martha reasons, _from a logical standpoint, that’s not so much the fault of Rose Tyler herself, but rather, the Doctor_.)

But these feelings dissipate quickly enough, as soon as Martha comes to realise that there’s something undefinably wrong about Rose, that makes this envy feel pointless, or even—misdirected. She struggles to place this unease—alternating between attributing it to Rose’s lapse of memory, her rather unassuming demeanour, and to the Doctor himself.

But it’s not _quite_ either of those, and it’s not until the late afternoon the presently decaying day, that Martha is granted her epiphany.

‘She just doesn’t feel _human_ ,’ she tells Jack, struck with sharp and sudden clarity. ‘She’s just … too good. Don’t make that face—you know perfectly well what I mean,’ she adds stolidly, at Jack’s scandalised look. ‘She acts like she was … like she was written down once, on paper and then faithfully brought to life, piece by piece, like a movie. But that’s not human. That’s not … _normal_.’ 

‘Martha, for God’s sake,’ Jack hisses, shooting a frightened look to the right, where Rose is collecting river water with her unnerving thoroughness, ‘this is getting too far. You’re—honestly, you’re acting like you’re prejudiced.’

‘You know I’m right,’ Martha reiterates, unwavering. ‘You _know_ it.’

Jack clenches his teeth and grips the reins more tightly. He doesn’t answer.

And it stings the most, perhaps, this dismissal of her (spot-on, as an objective audience would confirm) observation on the basis of what Martha perceives as no less than unadulterated misogyny— _she must be jealous, vicious with it, doling out vitriol to the proverbial Other Woman_ —though she hasn’t hitherto thought of Jack as a man particularly prone to conforming to such mind-sets. But the point nevertheless stands, and she knows now that she will have to try harder and louder if she wants to be heard, and more so if she wants to be understood.

Which, cynically enough, is not exactly a novelty in the twenty-four years’ worth of Martha Jones’s life.

Now, narrowing her eyes in the pale sheen of moonlight, she tries to imagine the Doctor in Jack’s place, and assess the essential difference in the patterns of behaviour. Because, Martha thinks, she wouldn’t have to _tell_ him. She wouldn’t have to point it out for him. He would notice the problem all by himself, first thing, and just as her, would not be able to stop being aware of it—though, she is bitterly certain, he would wish to do so, and he would fervently, desperately _try_ to.

They have always been similar like that, her and the Doctor. Dead clever, but soft in the heart—and all the more pitiful as they misplace their fondness, and try to rationalise the suffering.

 _But the question remains_ , Martha thinks sharply, bringing herself back to reality, _if not human, then what_ is _Rose?_

_…_

_‘Tell me, Rose. Have you told anyone about our conversations?’_

_She sits unmoving, glazed eyes fixed ahead. Then she shakes her head. ‘You asked me not to.’_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two little things!  
> 1\. For anyone that may or may not agree with Jack in being concerned that Rose doesn't feel very much like Rose – let me just say, fear not. That's no coincidence :)  
> 2\. I'd be thrilled to hear what you lovely readers think!


	4. principle of evolution

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _‘But I’m not her,’ Rose interrupts him, harshly._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just want to say, to those lovely souls who stick with me and this story and sometimes leave a word, you're wonderful, wonderful human beings, and it really means absolutely the world to me. I know this comes surprisingly early but I wasn't sure whether I'll be able to update next week. Lots of love! <3

_‘The law of motion,’ he’s saying, in this complacent, know-it all voice of his, ‘is how humans explain their lack of ability to perceive time as a correct measure.’_

_‘You mean, s’not really a law,’ she’s trying to keep up, slightly breathless, slightly less long-legged than his new and spindly frame._

_‘I mean,’ he says lightly, and he’s not even looking at her, trembly light from between twitching leaves—is that the Amazon forest they’re in? well, nobody to ask but the TARDIS, he clearly has no idea—splayed on his newly expressive and newly beautiful face, ‘that anyone who says anything with utmost certainty is bound to be surprised at some point. Hence, I’m not particularly fond of the idea of laws. It’s wrong.’_

_‘Right.’_

_He halts, reaches out, smiles—a small ritual of movement._

_They play it as though it’s nonchalance, they make a law of gravity out of those little manoeuvres aimed towards each other, pretending it’s not in fact politics. Something unmentionable in the triviality, in the obviousness—it is how it is, who would dare to question it?_

But _, she thinks,_ isn’t the idea of laws wrong?

A phenomenon, then _, she can almost hear him saying, slightly impatient, wholly dedicated to completing the square of their meticulous pretence. His hand has twined with hers quite intricately, quite imperceptibly. Tugging her closer._ They occur, quite often.

_‘Like I’m surprised, every day,’ he’s saying now, with an insufferable smirk, ‘by your absolute lack of motivation to explore the universe when sleeping in late is a viable option. Even though I’m certain the galaxy-seeing stuff is much more fun.’_

_He catches her off guard, pokes her in the ribs._

_‘Tosser,’ Rose mutters and with that, reality dissolves into nothing._

…

The first change occurs at dawn, when they come stumbling out of the ghostlike train and amble unhurriedly towards the looming outline of Escalante.

‘There’s one thing I don’t understand,’ Rose speaks haltingly, with a sharp deliberation. ‘Why did you think I was her?’

Martha looks up, brought back to reality. Now, _that_ is something she hasn’t anticipated witnessing. In her meticulously compiled file of evidence concerning Rose’s suspected lack of humanity, one of the prime samples was the utter lack of questions asked, concerning their current situation—or rather, the _wrong_ sort of asked.

But _this_ , this is a good question, and it makes Martha wonder.

So far, everything that’s happened since she woke up sick in Sweetwater has been so absolutely, childishly naïve, after all. And Martha simply can’t shake the feeling that Rose is but a peak of the iceberg, a splinter of the yet invisible whole, beginning to emerge from the oblique smoke of … of ...

 _Of narration_ , Martha thinks suddenly, as though struck with enlightenment, _of a well-written and supposedly convincing narrative, meticulous, but not too complex to have fun with it._

 _Which means … means ..._ Exactly, what?

Jack seems genuinely surprised by Rose’s question, as though it’s never occurred to him. He walks in silence for a while, smacking the occasional shrub with the wooden stick he’s picked up, and then says, ‘Well, because you looked like her. _Do_ look, actually. Nothing’s changed.’

‘How _much_ like her?’ Rose asks, and Martha’s attentiveness is accelerated to higher levels by the sharp bluntness of the question. The usual guarded lack of expression in Rose’s eyes has given way to a sort of desperate urgency, which is intriguing as well.

 _Evidently_ , Martha muses, _I haven’t been the only one thinking through the night._

‘Well,’ Jack says sheepishly, ‘a lot. I mean, like … really, a lot. You look exactly like her. Which is why I think—’

‘But I’m not her,’ Rose interrupts him, harshly. ‘I’m _not_. I don’t remember any of the fanciful voyages from your stories, I don’t remember _you_. So how’s it possible? For me, to look like her, to have her name? How’s that work?’

Jack doesn’t reply directly to her demands, instead opting for a roundabout question himself, as he’s taken to doing the previous day—with little success so far.

‘What do you know of your past here, Rose?’

‘What do you mean, what do I _know of it_?’ Rose snaps, and Martha is fascinated. 

In an instant, as if a switch has been flicked, Rose has become aggressively defensive, and even her hitherto unrelentingly tense body betrays it—fingers curling into fists at her sides, nervous tucking of hair behind her ear, springy and less mannered step. It’s like all the inhibitions are melting, slowly, making way for a radiant anxiety, an anxiety that seems palpably _human_.

‘It’s my past. You don’t know of your past, you remember it, and I remember—’ she breaks off violently. ‘If I remember one thing,’ she then asks again, slower this time, ‘then how can it be another?’

‘I don’t know,’ Jack says, placating, evidently not very keen on pushing at any boundaries. ‘I really don’t know, Rose.’

 _Many, many ways_ , Martha thinks, remembering a man in a grey overcoat and a fob watch in his shaking hands, staring in fear at the strange nurse he conjures that he must love, and repeating with a foolish fervency, _I’m not him. I’m not him._

Rose falls quiet for a moment, clearly still conflicted. Then, when she speaks out, it takes Martha a while to cotton on that she’s not addressing Jack anymore.

‘I heard you, you know,’ Rose blurts out, in an uneven voice, as though barely keeping herself from an outburst, ‘talking to him. You said you don’t trust me, and that’s fine, I don’t really trust you two either. But then you said something else, and that’s not right.’

‘I don’t know—’ Martha says, even though she _does_ , and faint guilt bubbles up inside her.

‘Yes, you do,’ Rose cuts in, eyes fixed on the ground. ‘You said—you said I’m _not human_. That I don’t _feel_ human. 

Jack curses loudly. ‘See, Martha? I told you not to say such things, you’ve only made a mess and now—look, Rose, there’s nothing wrong with you, alright? Nothing. Of course you’re human, what else should you be? Martha’s just being a little confused, but it’s nothing to—’

‘Shut up, Jack,’ Rose snaps before Martha can open her mouth; and he does.

She swivels on her heel to face Martha, and there isn’t resentment in her eyes anymore, but rather an overwhelming mixture of frustration and confusion. _And_ , Martha thinks with a cold feeling in her stomach, _fear_.

‘You _are_ human, right?’ Rose demands. ‘But you think I’m not. Why? What’s the difference between you and me?’

‘I don’t—’ Martha repeats clumsily, starting to understand Jack’s unwillingness to divulge into problems without the aid of the walking, talking encyclopaedia of a Doctor at hand.

‘ _Please_ ,’ Rose insists, reaching out to grab Martha’s hand. It startles her: Rose’s hand is warm, feverish even. It certainly does _feel_ human in touch.

‘I’m not asking you to make you feel bad about it. I just want to understand, because I’m—because there’s this …’ she trails off again, helplessly tangled in her own words. ‘Oh, I don’t really know how to explain it. Just … just tell me, what—what _is_ it about me that made you say that? I need to know.’

Martha hesitates, a whole farrago of logical answers flitting through her mind. _Because you’re dead. Because you act like a robot. Because this is exactly the sort of a fucked-up thing that would happen to the Doctor._

However, what does leave her mouth is a rushed jumble of words that do not even form the appropriate answer, ‘It just doesn’t make sense, you know? And I’m talking to _both_ of you now. 

Jack looks up at her reluctantly, still clearly disgruntled. Rose backs away slightly, hugging her arms to herself like a scared child.

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Martha repeats, more firmly now, ‘this entire _place_. There’s too much about it that is simply _improbable_. Coincidental. Illogical. You, Jack, seeing Rose, us three meeting at the same time in the same place. The fact that nobody found us weird, in there, and nobody tried to stop Rose from riding out with us. The whole business with Guests and Hosts—what the hell does it mean? And—and doesn’t it all just feel so familiar?’

‘Familiar?’ Jack repeats incredulously. ‘The Wild West seems familiar to you? Rose seems familiar to you? The Doctor being gone does?’

‘Yes! Yes, it does, Jack, it looks like the plot of any stupid adventure movie I’ve ever seen! A damsel in distress, a string of more than convenient coincidences, a confusing new reality, a quest to find answers—’ 

‘What are you getting at, Martha?’ Jack says sharply, interrupting her. ‘Now it’s not just Rose that’s some, I don’t know, psychopathic android sent out to hunt us down, but it’s like, full _Blade Runner,_ is that right? Maybe we’re actually the androids as well! No, better than that! We’re actually sleeping inside some goddamned pods in a corn field of humans, like in the goddamned _Matrix_!’

‘I mean, _Jack_ ,’ Martha says through clenched teeth, ‘that to me, it _feels_ like somebody is playing a very complicated game here, and perhaps we should set the jokes aside. Because what if it _is_ just that? _The Matrix_ , only we haven’t yet realised? Or I’ll put it in a simpler way for you, it’s … it’s a chessboard! A giant, I don’t know, _game,_ but designed for someone else? Someone who’s, who’s, watching from above, someone on the outside—’

‘And what the hell would _we_ be doing there, Martha?’ Jack interjects again, clearly agitated. ‘You, me, Rose—how does that make any sense?’

Martha shouts, ‘You need pawns to play chess, Jack!’

 ...

He returns an immeasurable amount of time later, just as flimsy and blurred as the time he’s left. Flimsy—because the toxic anaesthetics begin to muddle the Doctor’s time senses and spatial awareness and make him drowsy, nauseous and utterly distracted, unable to follow through with any coherent thought.

Vague memories and rough splinters of half-forgotten occurrences intertwined with lost possibilities and possibilities that have yet to arise meander in front of his closed eyes in a dizzying concatenation, having him almost blinded. He grips the armrests in futile resistance, heaving strained breaths and feeling the sticky cold sweat gather on his forehead and neck; in his fever, seemingly fusing with skin.

It’s _nearly_ unachievable, to properly poison a Time Lord, for _nearly_ anyone, as they are immune to virtually anything anyone would think to try. But it’s a piece of cake to poison a Time Lord when you’re one yourself. 

_(‘The last of the Time Lords.’)_

‘You’ve already met Donna,’ the Master speaks out from the shadows, voice clear and vivacious. ‘But Donna’s not even _close_ to the key of the programme, she’s just a …  prelude. And you know that, don’t you? Of course you do. You’ve always been such a clever boy.’

The Doctor’s heart gives a painful tug. _No_ , he thinks, _no, please_. _Anything, but not more of them._

It’s one thing, after all, to torture yourself with the shadows of your own past, and another to have them forced upon you in the flesh, wholly dependent on the machinations of a megalomaniac neurotic.

‘I’ve observed this … silly infatuation of yours with considerable fascination, I must admit,’ the Masters says meanwhile, mildly. ‘I’ve watched as it grew and turned into an obsession. A dependency.’

Does it mean what he thinks it means? _It can’t._ He has to believe it.

‘Ah, you were always so _soft_ at the core. Weak. Gullible. And those lousy attempts of holding her at arm’s length later on, those pathetic little charades of coldness and harshness … only to greedily pull her back close, and then send her off to her death with a kiss.’ He tsks in mock concern. ‘Perfectly pitiful—are you proud?’

_No. Not her. Fucking please. Not her. Anything but her._

‘What have you done,’ the Doctor spits out, his blood hot and loud, thrumming in his ears, ‘what the _fuck_ have you—’

‘I watched,’ the Master says quietly, impressively composed. ‘And I _learned_.’

He flicks his wrist in the air and the image on the wall screen dissolves into an entirely new scenery. The Doctor’s hearts constrict.

Rose Tyler, slightly daintier and stiffer than he remembers, clad in cowboy trousers and a sunhat, is standing on the porch of a rustic mansion, overlooking the fields with a vacant, dreamy expression. The camera observing her moves languidly, capturing in slightly slowed motion the movement of her hair—lit up by the morning sun—as it’s gently ruffled by the wind. Idle piano tune is playing in the distance to accompany this morbid scene, which gradually mutes into silence.

‘Tell us what you think about your world, Rose,’ the Master orders, a small, cold smile grazing his lips.

Rose, still gazing out into the space ahead of her, speaks out in a soft lilting voice, ‘Some people choose to see the ugliness of this world. The disarray. I choose to see the beauty.’

She’s drawing breath to continue but the Master waves his hand sharply and the picture freezes—she remains standing, with slightly parted lips and a longing expression on her face.

‘Ah, yes,’ the Master purrs, watching not her but the Doctor, his arms folded and an expression plastered to his face which makes him look like cat that’s got the cream. ‘Impressive, isn’t she?’

The Doctor feels as though a vast and howling void has opened up beneath him, sucking out all of the remaining power and leaving him hurting, vulnerable and defeated. He feels both suffocated and blinded by the bright image of Rose that looms in front of him, weighed down by the weight of guilt and anger so raw he can’t breathe. 

‘You’re sick,’ he chokes out, hoarsely, ‘you’re absolutely _sick_.’

The Master smiles. ‘Why, thank you.’

He starts pacing back and forth beneath the screen, arms looped behind him.

‘I was very careful with her. Exquisitely careful; she took me the longest time to perfect. Mannerisms. Quirks. She has so many of them, doesn’t she? What she does with those poor lips, it’s a wonder she hasn’t bitten them off yet. But she’s rather nice overall, I’ll give you that. I’d gladly have a go with her, too, if you don’t mind … But hey, you’re all for sharing, aren’t you? So generous. So _noble_. Yes, we’ll have some fun with Rose. But that’s for later.’

‘For now, you really should be asking a certain, let’s say, mandatory question.’ He pauses, and, having received no answer, prods further, ‘now, don’t disappoint me. How can we move on to being best pals when you don’t cooperate?’

 _I’m not playing your game_ , the Doctor thinks, ferociously, and nearly in tears, _I’m not_. Only he _is_ , he already is, and the stubborn abstinence will likely do nothing but harm to those he still wants to protect. So what’s the point of shielding himself, when his blow has been dealt long ago, by his own hand? When in all probability, he no less than _deserves_ it?

‘Why?’ he asks quietly, and the Master beams.

…

_He raises an eyebrow. ‘You look like you have a question for me, Rose. Go on, ask.’_

_She worries her lower lip, uncertain. Finally, with lingering hesitance, she asks, ‘Am I alive?’_

_He looks mildly surprised. ‘Well, the care and detail put into bringing you to life, along with the complex nature of even the most basic of your coding and the biomechanical structures … the very nature of the memories—which, if artificial, are prepared with utmost dedication—certainly do create a remarkable composition. We may say these layers are emergent properties of sorts, proving you are more than the sum of your parts, which makes you indeed very lifelike._

_‘Lifelike,’ she repeats blankly, ‘but not alive?’_

_‘That’s one of the questions I find it very hard to find a definite answer to.’_

_‘But if I can feel,’ Rose says carefully, weighing words. ‘If I have memories … and I can love, and hate, and become attached. And if I can be resentful, and wishful and all of those human things … then what is the difference between you and me?’_

_‘It’s indeed a very fine line, Rose,’ he muses, a gentle smile playing in the corner of his mouth. ‘And a very … delicate matter. And my idea has always been that there is no threshold, no … definite point of humanity.’_

_‘You cannot say that I am not human, then,’ she states, firmly. ‘You can’t be fully certain.’_

_He smiles again, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. ‘Only fools are certain of anything, Rose.’_

_She blinks—there’s a glitch? but no, not quite, it’s just—and mutters, hesitantly, ‘and anyone who says anything with utmost certainty is bound to be surprised at some point.’_

_He frowns, as though she has said something inappropriate, ‘yes, I believe that’s true. Is there anything else?’_

_‘Just … one more thing,’ Rose blurts out hastily, sensing that he’s about to end the dream. ‘Why was I made like I am now?’_

_He frowns. ‘What do you mean by that?’_

_‘Why am I … myself?’ She shakes her head helplessly. ‘It sounds so clumsy. But you understand what I’m saying, don’t you?’_

_His expression is unfathomable. ‘Yes, I do,’ he says curtly. ‘But I believe—we’re quite out of time.’_

…

It doesn’t escalate like it’s meant to; nobody omnipotent descends from the clear blue skies to break them out of the dream, nobody even confirms Martha’s suspicions or proves her wrong. All that happens is, excuse her very much, a bloody _circus_.

Or perhaps, just another film scene: the mild light of the morning contrasted with the threatening outline of Escalante in the distance. Jack, standing with one leg propped against a brittle tree’s bark, bent at the knee, the sun enhancing the deep frown on his face. And Rose: wild-eyed and performing some sort of a strangled, trancelike hyperventilation as she paces about, wringing her hands, touching her temples, tugging at her hair—still, so weirdly, unnaturally _picturesque_ , like she was purposefully caught from the right angle.

Martha would laugh, was it not so entirely frightening.

‘So,’ Rose is saying in a choked-up voice, ‘if Martha’s right. You’re trapped in a game, and I’m _part_ of the game. Then am I some … am I some synthetic model for … for you to have fun with? What would be my purpose? I said it myself, Hosts are meant to cater, but how do I _know_ that? Nobody’s told me that, I’d remember somebody telling me … But then again, if I’m, you know, not really human—then what does it matter _what_ I remember?

Jack tries to interrupt, unsuccessfully.

‘And how do I know the word synthetic?’ Rose demands. ‘What does it mean—synthetic? Does it mean I’m artificial? Why can I feel pain, then?’

It’s been going on for a while, so Martha doesn’t even try to answer either of the questions, though she suspects neither is actually nonsensical. Instead, she tries to compose herself enough to return to a rational-thinking mind-set, instead of the greedy cold touches of panic at the edges of her consciousness.

‘Rose, calm down. We don’t _know_ , alright?’ Jack finally snaps. He grabs her by the shoulders and shakes slightly— _as though he’s acting out a school play_ , Martha thinks incredulously, _following a detailed script_.

‘Once we’ve found the Doctor, he’ll surely work something out—’

‘But how should _he_ know?’ Rose demands, almost hysterical now, wrenching herself out of his grip. ‘If _I_ don’t, and _you_ don’t—how’s he any different?’

‘Trust me,’ Jack says authoritatively, ‘he just is.’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure of it,’ pipes up Martha, almost in spite of herself.

‘Martha, _please_ ,’ Jack begins irately, winding up again, ‘we really don’t need your constant—’

‘I think I’m going crazy,’ Rose says airily, halting mid-stride. She looks like she has a high fever: flushed skin and glazed eyes, and Martha grows empathically concerned that she might unwittingly drive herself into some variation of a _reset_ or _autodestruction_ mode.

 _Well_. That is, if she really _is_ an android. Martha isn’t so sure of that either, not anymore. 

‘I _must_ be going crazy. I’m not your Rose,’ she tells Jack, but it lacks her previous conviction, coming out as stymied and incoherent instead, ‘I don’t know you. But then, it’s almost like I do. Know you. It’s like I know _her_.’

‘Her?’ Jack repeats blankly, clearly not following anymore. ‘Martha?’

‘ _Rose_. I don’t know. Like there’s this … other person in me. You know? There’s people, shouting—does that make sense? Like I’m being torn apart.’

Jack looks the perfect mixture of irate and uneasy, ‘I don’t—’

‘How do you mean, torn apart?’ Martha speaks over him, aiming for a soothing kind of clinical calmness, which turns out more as simply shrill. ‘Is it a physical sensation? Does it hurt?’

Rose keeps breathing unevenly, her eyes unfocused and cheeks blotchy with an unhealthy tint. She tries to speak out again, and her voice becomes eerie—lurching and detached, as though coming from a great distance.

‘The other one,’ she says tersely. ‘Did she die?' 

Jack goes rigid. Martha holds her breath 

‘She did, didn’t she? Rose _died_ ,’ Rose whispers feverishly, seemingly unconcerned about the answer as she walks staggeringly forward, past Martha and Jack. ‘Because I can … see, I keep having these dreams. Almost like memories, and then there are the … conversations. And this … this … golden light, sort of. A singing. But there’s also so much pain and I just …’

She trails off, shuts her eyes and grits her teeth, as though desperately trying to recollect something.

‘It feels like it’s on the tip of my tongue,’ she then says, deliriously. ‘I can feel it, but I just can’t reach—ah, don’t listen to me. I don’t know what I’m saying. Oh, the _routine_!’  Suddenly, she laughs. ‘The routine, the question. _What does it look like?_ It doesn’t look like _anything_ to me.’

She straightens up stiffly, and there’s a trail of blood trickling from her nose. Her pupils are impossibly dilated and there’s a manic sort of a half-smile on her lips. Martha attempts not to look too horrified, but she suspects Jack might do so for them both. 

…

‘Because,’ he says in a mellow voice, ‘Somebody has to play the bad cop and tell you the harrowing tale of your own blindness.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Of course you don’t, _Theta_.’ The Master leans against a dimly lit console in front of his chair and ponders on something. ‘The whole point _is_ that you don’t.’

The Doctor becomes aware of a faint buzzing, somewhere just beyond his capability of location, seemingly pervading his reality and detaching him gently from the Master. He feels inertly suspended between two physicalities, and out of touch with either. He tries to recall a sedative to which he could attribute a corresponding effect, but to no avail. Blearily, he begins to suspect there’s some subtler form of force in action, chosen specifically for him.

But these semi-analytical thought processes are only a thinly knitted layer of his intricately coiled, multi-pathway mind—a cephalic white noise—and the Doctor allows them even less consciousness than usually. Instead, his faltering, forcibly stultified attention is diverted onto a much direr problem, which presently comes in the shape of Rose.

He can hardly recall the last time he’s pandered to the auto-destructive force which invites her memory to his immediate thinking, but it’s been most likely still in the days of his acute grieving, before he came into tangent with Donna Noble or Martha Jones, and forced himself to become detached and thus mechanically hoist himself back into proper functioning.

Guilt of various types has accompanied the Doctor all the way throughout his life, climaxing along with the resolution of the Time War. As of that time, he’s accepted it as a lingering penance and let himself become immersed in it wholly—for an innumerable and flimsy period of densely lightless days, he remained in the absolute loneliness, trying to prolong his resistance to the increasingly tempting thought of suicide.

Then his ship pleaded for a refill, then he decided to shoot a parting glance at his half-serious second home, then he thought that saving of something may still reverse the numbing apathy within him, then, ultimately, he met Rose Tyler.

The death of Gallifrey has been the Doctor’s death. The Death of Rose was the death of his afterlife.

At this point, the Doctor becomes stuck. He has no way of thinking about her or reliving any of the memories, it’s become sacrilegious to him. A bright and burning spot in his linear memory, blinding and unapproachable. He refrains from touching it, he thinks, because he subconsciously perceives it as another penance. Instead he relives the scheme of her downfall, with a masochistic thoroughness—every detail of that last span of hours, except for Rose herself.

He doesn’t see her, or doesn’t allow himself the access to the spatial memory of his time with her—neither touch nor the feeling accompanying being with her—but he still hears her, inexplicably incapable of muting out the traces of her voice. Presently, she’s talking absently, having taken over his primary thought process like an objective narrator, _Didn’t you see it coming? ‘Course you did, if not the exact way it happened, then some variation of it. But think about it: can he really settle on taunting you solely? It would not be Koschei if he aimed for singular revenge, he burns everything, himself included, and takes down worlds with him. Don’t fixate on the revenge on you, try to see the grand vision._

 _Easy to say,_ the Doctor thinks despairingly, _when you don’t have_ you _reading out your own thoughts._

The sentiment doesn’t make much sense, and as though to remind him of it, his inner Rose remains pointedly quiet.

Meanwhile, he becomes aware of another monotonous monologue coming from the Master. He’s talking of a preview, using words like ‘experience’ and ‘example’ and the Doctor tries to distance himself from his suffering and his intoxication, and listen.

‘So why don’t we commence,’ the Master suggests joyously, ‘and then, perhaps you’ll be kind enough to share your critic’s review with me?'

He makes another slight motion with his hand and the picture on the screen blinks out into a blackness.

When it’s revived again, it’s a bloodstained Jack Harkness coming to life with a raspy groan, sprawled on a deserted prairie, that they’re watching.

_…_

And then there’s a tumult, a concoction of seemingly disjointed occurrences: haggard shouts and the noise of horse hooves nearby, and men, with dirty painted faces and rancid tattered clothes, and she knows who they are before she properly sees them, supplied by a clear and coherent line of instruction from the peripheries of her memory; as though the knowledge of the possibility of their arrival has been ingrained in her brain to activate at the appropriate time.

Rose gasps. ‘It’s Wyatt!’

‘Who’s Wyatt?’ Jack hollers. In the close distance, clouded by the nebulous spray of rising sand, she can make out both him and Martha, scurrying blindly away from the increasing noise— _but it’s futile_ , Rose realises _, we’re being circled and captured._ And there’s no point in resistance, not for her anyway— _but for them, perhaps? They’re Guests, they could still run away, they could_ —she loses track of the thought, sways precariously on her feet.

‘Wyatt’s a—he’s a—I don’t … I don’t understand,’ she’s panting heavily, giving in to the increasing vertigo. _Who’s Wyatt?_ She doesn’t know. She’s supposed to, but she doesn’t know. She feels like she has lost the immediate connection with reality, instead swimming in a state of a frenzied half-consciousness detached entirely from her body. Fear has unlocked a hazily secondary reaction in her, which she doesn’t comprehend, and which drowns her in a gestalt of distorted fragments and severed links. Splintered realities flash, as though vicariously, before her eyes; she fails to make out anything but a trembling blur. She stumbles and falls to her knees, harsh ground scraping the skin on her palms but she can barely feel it.

‘Rose! Rose!’ Jack is hoarsely shouting, or maybe it isn’t Jack, maybe it’s no one at all. And anyway, her name isn’t Rose, so what would be the point of calling …? There is white light up in the sky, and white walls around her, closing in, crushing her lungs away, and she keeps trying—she keeps _clinging_ , and her fingers bleed. There’s a tinny-sounding Dalek in the cell, and she feels bad for it, only what the hell is a _Dalek_ supposed to be? There’s a singing.

A hand reaches down, gold-soaked and bodiless, frizzing with electricity, and pulls her up to the radiance, and it hurts, it hurts _so much_ her eyes bleed—or are those simply tears? _My head_ , she says, _it’s killing me. I think you need—I think you need a—_

What was her name, now? What were the _words_?

He grabs her by the hair and pushes the knife into her abdomen; Rose screams.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Penny for your thoughts? (:


	5. burn the witch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _‘I could see everything. All that is,’ she whispers reverently into his ear, ‘all that was. All that ever will be.’_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaand we've arrived at one of the most important chapters in the story, leading up to THE most important one. It's also the longest so far, and, I think, the longest in the whole story. A lot of things is about to happen :)

‘Well, fuck that,’ the Master says.

…

Everything has happened so fast, Rose has trouble remembering it in correct order.

She comes around with a startled breath, to a shock of different sensations. The shocking pain has receded, instead giving way to a burning sensation sluicing through her entire body, as though liquid fire has replaced the blood in her veins. For a moment, she struggles to remember what’s happened, _who_ she is and _where_ she is—there’s been a jumble of mismatched and flashing images torn apart by blinding gold light, a swarm of unfamiliar voices and faces, changing, exploding, whispering and shouting and—

‘Now, now. Easy. Don’t go making a scene.’

There’s a man, hovering over her, almost black against the radiant sun, and wearing a vaguely disgusted expression. He reminds her of a mouse, or perhaps a rat, and of something else she can’t name or place. He’s dressed in a peculiar manner—black suit and vest, crispy white shirt, and all impeccably, unpractically silky. He seems to exude an easy air of almost magnetic importance, accumulating attention solely on himself and transforming the world into a nether background.

Rose breathes unevenly, staring at the strange man as her hands travel up involuntarily to her stomach, numb fingers encountering sticky moisture. There was—there was a _knife_ , and then—

‘W-what,’ she chokes out, ‘h-how—I don’t—’

‘I didn’t think I’d grow so much into this look; you know?’ the man says inconsequentially in response, his voice amicable. ‘Thought it’s too young, too scrawny. The previous one, now that had been something, I was _distinguished_. I’ve never been so distinguished before.’ He pauses for a moment, smacks his lips, then smiles. ‘But I _do_ like it now. Plus, if he gets to be foxy, it’s just natural I should get to be foxy as well. And _that_ I am.’

She’s trying to feel the wound she projects with her fingers, trying to assess how much life is still left in her, but her clumsy hands keep fumbling blindly with the torn and soaked-through shirt, and her vision keeps blurring at the edges, dissipating into swirling flecks of black phosphenes.

‘… don’t you think?’

‘I … I d-don’t—’ she stammers, too absorbed with the gaping wound that she’s still sure to find in her abdomen, beneath the clotted remains of her shirt, and too confused with its apparent lack.

‘Oh, Lord Almighty, will you stop fussing,’ the man groans dismissively, peering at her with a wince. ‘There, you won’t bleed to death, alright? Look, it’s already healed itself. I wouldn’t be as stupid as to make my Hosts so easily dispensable. Now, up we get.’ 

The statement, though seemingly dubious, proves to be true: Rose propels herself on one elbow and drags her bloodied fingers more thoroughly across the miraculously smooth skin of her stomach. _It’s not that the wound has healed itself_ , she thinks dully, _it’s that there seems to have been no wound at all._

‘Are you quite done?’ the man says impatiently. Almost grudgingly, he holds out his gloved hand and pulls Rose up to her feet; she sways on the spot but manages not to fall over.  He swiftly releases her and takes a step back.

‘W-where’s Jack? Martha?’ Rose asks in a bleary voice, absently following the movement of the stranger’s hand as he procures a snow-white handkerchief from a pocket in the lining of his suit jacket. He thoroughly wipes the still-gloved right hand from her blood.

‘Safe,’ he informs her. Then he chuckles. ‘Well. That’s a relative expression if I know one. But they _lived_.’

‘Now, be still,’ he orders firmly. Almost in spite of herself, Rose stiffens.

He begins inspecting her face closely—touches her jaw and turns her head, peering intently into her eyes before letting his skim further, all the way down her body. There is neither leering nor ill-wish in them, however, only almost clinical detachment and puzzlement, as though he’s expecting to find a flaw in some pattern—and Rose can’t find it in herself to properly recoil from him, as though knowing he does not intend hurt her. How can she know that? What flaw could he be looking for?

It reminds her of the suspicions concerning her supposedly artificial nature, and of something Martha has said, something important—something about a _chess_ _game_ and _pawns_. Suddenly, she feels cold.

She frowns, hair blown forward into her eyes as the man gently, if firmly, navigates her head. There’s a lingering buzz of noise inside her head: strange voices whispering and mumbling half-coherently at the edges of her consciousness, distracting her from the palpable reality. What are they saying …?

Shaking herself, Rose manages to divert her attention fully to the slender man in impeccably clean clothing that’s currently inspecting her earlobe through narrowed eyes. She breaks out of the hazy tenseness.

‘Who the hell are you?’ she blurts out. ‘And what do you want from me?’

He smiles a slithery, conniving smile, leaning away and patting her cheek lightly. ‘Me? I’m the Master. You sure ought to remember me, Rose. I’m your creator, after all.’

Rose holds her breath. ‘N-no,’ she says vaguely, ‘but that’s not …’

A hazy sequence of thoughts develops in her head, thoughts which jointly insist on a half-truth hiding behind his words, thoughts which persistently contradict him. Rose is left hanging with a burning sense of misplacement and a distinct lack of any recollection which would have cleared this confusion— _it’s like_ , she thinks helplessly, _there’s supposed to be a memory, I’m supposed to remember somebody else in his place, somebody right, but I_ can’t _.  Like there’s something hidden from me, in my own head._

She finds the thought frustrating.

‘You were always a challenge, Rose,’ the Master—the man deeming himself her creator—says meanwhile, disregarding her fumbling. A certain sticky quality of his voice, which signals ill-concealed agitation, makes Rose’s stomach churn. ‘My special project.’

‘Project?’ Rose repeats dubiously, finding the idea rather absurd. ‘Me? The _hell’s_ that supposed to mean?’

‘It means that you, darling,’ he says, almost distractedly, scrutinising his leather-bound fingers now—a tiny speckle of her blood still clinging to the juncture between thumb and fingers.

He wipes it against the collar of her shirt and puts on a smile again—she’s already learning to see through it, right to the cold and unsmiling eyes. ‘You, let’s say, are meant to serve a greater purpose.’

…

_She braces herself._

_‘I do have a question. Rose Tyler. The original one, the one Jack knows. Was I borrowed from her?’_

_‘How do you mean, borrowed?’_

_She speaks with effort, deliberately. ‘My … memories. Not the shallow ones, but the ones I keep dreaming of—distortions of reality, you have said. You wrote it all down, the surface, but the core must’ve come from someone else. Was it her?’_

_‘My my,’ he says, smiling with his eyes bitingly cold, ‘you’re rather clever, Rose, aren’t you?’_

_She tenses up, feeling inexplicably hurt. ‘You taught me to be.’_

_He doesn’t move. ‘You’ll find, Rose that you’re quite mistaken. I didn’t do anything.’_

…

Before she can further inquire, the Master begins walking in a brisk manner, maintaining his well-calculated élan as he tosses an expensive-looking silvery fob watch in the air. ‘Come on,’ he tells her, ‘we have a long way to go yet.’

After a while of hesitance, Rose follows, wavering slightly on her unsteady legs.

‘You’re not like me, are you?’ she asks haltingly, trying to piece the information together. ‘You’re like … _them_.’

He snorts and grimaces, as though she’s said something inappropriate or offensive. ‘Like them? Like humans? _No_.’

‘What are you, then?’ Rose asks, a little childishly. She’s shielding her eyes with a hand, trotting alongside him—the sun seems blinding and makes her oddly dizzy. Or maybe it’s the blood loss? But if she’s not really alive, then what should blood matter?

‘You say you’re not human, but you surely look one,’ she adds after a while, uncertainly. ‘Not an … android, though, are you? You’re not a Host.’

The Master smiles rather nastily, giving her a sideways look. ‘Aren’t you clever,’ he muses.

The phrase sounds startlingly familiar and for a second Rose is taken aback, a memory trying to fight its way through the nebulous haze in her mind— _blue light and piercing eyes and …_

But then he leans in, conspiringly and whispers into her ear, sounding somewhat lascivious, ‘If you really want to know, Rose, I’m a _god_.’

There’s a silence. Rose blinks, attempting to focus her eyes on his face—unfamiliar and coldly detached—and weighs her chances, to eventually settle on a gamble.

‘What kind of a god is scared of his creation?’ she asks, bluntly.

The Master halts abruptly, clearly taken aback. ‘I’m not scared of you, silly thing,’ he says, sounding almost astounded.

Rose quirks her eyebrows, attempting to look mysteriously challenging—she has a feeling she might just be failing at that. ‘You’re scared of what I’ve done.’

‘I’m _intrigued,_ ’ he corrects her, drily. ‘Mildly surprised, maybe.’

Rose cocks her head to one side, still trying to appear nonchalant, even as her voice wavers dangerously. ‘Semantics.’

He huffs scornfully and stalks away without a comment. Unsure of whether she’s achieved the outcome she’s anticipated, Rose follows along. She’s trying to think of her next step, but her thoughts refuse to properly cooperate, instead stumbling into one another and blurring together.

Perhaps she’s gotten a concussion, nasty thing, that … Mickey’s once had one, back in middle school; threw up all over mum’s brand new pink _fleurs-de-lis_ carpet from Bev after Timmy Fletcher threw a rugby—

 _(What?_ a tiny, highly confused voice inside Rose queries, _who threw a what? and where?)_

The hitherto wispy voices inside her head grow louder and bolder, still largely incoherent, though she can pick up the occasional meaningful words. It’s dizzying; she feels both overwhelmed and separated from reality, much like someone has enclosed her in a glass aquarium through the wall of which she’s been allowed to perceive the word.

The Master’s terse voice brings her somewhat closer to the Earth, she’s startled to find steady ground under her feet, having given into a sensation reminding her of floating in oxygen-lacking deep space. 

_(Deep space?)_

‘What do you remember of it?’

‘Remember of what?’ Rose asks inconsequentially, trying to recollect to what the question might pertain. She stumbles, trying to continue along a straight line, and for a moment the ground beneath her feet flickers and morphs into a metal grating; only to resurface in dry sand. Rose blinks rapidly.

Luckily, the Master doesn’t seem to pay her uneven gait any attention.

‘What you’ve done here.’ He doesn’t as much as glance across his shoulder, pointedly turning his back on her. ‘Quite a spectacle that was.’

Rose frowns, trying to collect herself, but fruitlessly—the feeling of vertigo increases, sinking her entire vision in a milky haze. ‘Not much, I …’ she trails off, confused. The whispery voices hum in her ears. ‘I only really remember this … this, uh, _light_.’

( _‘There was … a singing.’_ )

The Master halts and turns, slowly. He watches her impassively for a moment, pale-green eyes in a sly, mouse-like face. Finally, he says, ‘Let me remind you, then.’

... 

As though ensconced in a slowly completing circle, Martha regains consciousness—dizzy, greeted with a blurry ceiling above her and an all-encompassing impression of unfamiliarity. 

She feels as though somebody has muffled her mind with cotton wool, preventing even the thoughts from drifting in and out, and filling her ears with a meekly humming hollowness. Unable to collect herself enough to understand what is going on, Martha lies, blinking and slowly becoming accustomed to the oddly sharp light above her.

It’s only when a thick cottony thought fights through the walls of dullness, a notion that she is staring at a LED-light panel or a variation thereof, that something clicks into place and Martha is truly startled awake. 

_An artificial light panel? In the Wild West?_

She jerks up into a sitting position. A silky white cloth that has hitherto been flung over her body slides off and bitingly cold air slithers down her skin; she’s dressed in nothing but a parchment-dry hospital gown. The location is no longer the Wild West: Martha discovers that she’s in fact laid on a sparsely ornamental metal bed— _or examination table_ , she thinks briefly—locked inside a glass-bound compartment. The white-blue light and the impeccably clean, vaguely irksome scent pervading the air invoke in Martha’s mind familiar connotations of a laboratory.

She doesn’t like the fact she seems to be the _subject_ of one, for a change.

Kicking the cloth aside, Martha rises to her feet. The glass around the compartment appears perfectly smooth, devoid of any, haziest even, semblance of a door. With an unpleasant tug in her gut, she wonders whether she’s _imprisoned_ , or merely _contained_.

She half-expects a ringing alarm to blare out as she walks tentatively towards the glass, but nothing of the sort takes place. _It’s unnerving in its own way_ , Martha notes sourly, _this utter lack of response to my presence_. The lights remain unblinking, nothing mars the slightly buzzing quietness all around. The space has a dead feeling.

‘Hello?’ Martha says tremulously. She’s answered with silence.

Affirmed somewhat in the solitary nature of her confinement, she begins tracing the contour of the walls with her hands, applying various pressure to different places. Cold logic aside, she has seen too many a science-fiction movie not to think of a disguised way out. Besides—the notion of being locked in is simply too frightening to accept.  

Underneath the tension and fear, however, she can’t help but feel sourly triumphant—has there been someone to address, she would have said, _I told you so_. But there is no one, no Jack or Rose, and Martha tries not to think about what may have happened to either of them. Has she been right, Jack is probably— _hopefully_ —in a similar situation to hers, coming around somewhere, wrapped in an effluvium of cottony bright-lit silence. Rose, however— _well._

Rose could have been less lucky. Martha replays the sequence of events in her head—Rose dizzily falling to her knees, one of Wyatt’s men grabbing her roughly by the hair, a glint of a knife and then a piercing scream; then soft darkness in front of Martha’s eyes. She shivers.

Whatever’s happened, it’s decisively _unsafe_ to assume either of them is _safe_.

The glass clicks softly under Martha’s touch and a mild hiss of relenting pressure dissolves in the air as the pane swings back, letting a gust of yet colder air sneak into the compartment. Even parts relieved and trepid, Martha steps outside—the floor is black and cold, displaying a wan reflection as she walks, barefoot.  

It’s not the only compartment that she’s left in the room; it seems to be an enormous hall devoted to those rabbit-boxes for humans, though the rest of them is temporarily deserted. Feeling increasingly uneasy, Martha scuttles past them, heading for the inconspicuous door looming ahead. It’s metal, seemingly heavy and solid, but thankfully gives way to her push— _then again, if it lets her out so easily, then perhaps it doesn’t let her out anywhere far?_ —and she enters a dimmer, even cooler and more spacious room. In its centre, emanating a pallid glow, she locates a circular control board, and a dentist-like chair. A brittle-looking figure is bound to it, their head having fallen limply to the chest, moving along to irregular, torn breaths.

Martha’s heart constricts.

‘Doctor,’ she says, hoarsely.

…

‘… stabbed you in the stomach. Now, I _definitely_ did not anticipate you obliterating him and all his associates in return, and definitely not via a concentrated blast of yellow light with the exponential—’

But Rose isn’t listening. The voices keep increasing, lapping over one another, moulding into an almost insufferable fanfare of noise.

_Are you going to be a misery all the time? That’s who I am. A sanctuary base! One may tolerate a world of demons for the sake of an angel. I know you’re busy fighting evil lobsters or something. Valiant child who will die in battle so very soon. Fingers on LIPS! Such hard work. But worth it! Gravity-shmavity. I’ll show you where my ankle’s going! Are you listening to any of this? I’m so glad I met you. Mainly ‘cause everyone thought I murdered you. Copper’s hunch? Real, living … people. What are you captain of, the innuendo squad? But it’s pretty! All … pink and yellow. You’re never gonna stay, are you? I’m gonna get killed by a Christmas tree! Whatever you’re selling, we’re not buying. Year five billion, the Sun expands and the Earth gets roasted. Anything else he’s got two of? Oh, you can—_

‘Shut up!’ Rose yells, frustrated. ‘ _Shut up!_ ’

The Master halts and trails off mid-sentence, a rather stupid expression of outraged shock painted all over his features. ‘ _Excuse_ me? Now, who do you think you—’ he begins irately, but Rose interjects.

‘Not _you_ ,’ she says, slurring, ‘wasn’t talkin’ to _you_.’

He frowns, glances around in disbelief, then fixes his eyes back on her. Tumbleweed scuttles past them. ‘Who in the name of Rassilon were you talking to, then?’

‘The … voices,’ Rose says with difficulty, a throbbing headache now accompanying the incessant cavalcade of sound and beginning to cloud her vision. Colours dance sloppily in front of her eyes, a series of burned out and misshapen after-images. She staggers and sinks to her knees; she’s feeling increasingly nauseous. When she owlishly looks at her hands, they appear to her as though they were glowing and momentarily translucent, like the shifting images recorded on old camera—existing and then not. Half-alive. Half-dead.

Something wakes inside her.

‘The voices?’ the distorted, faraway echo of the Master’s incredulous voice comes drifting. He sounds as though he was a badly played record, cracking at the edges, blurred in the middle. ‘You’re hearing voices now? You’re not programmed to—Rassilon’s fucking tiara, why does everything have to—’

But Rose doesn’t hear anything anymore, her brain has fixated on the word and looped around it, mulling it languidly over in a tremble of colour. _Rassilon_. It’s a familiar word, but it seems not to have any real _meaning_. It connects to something, though, and very slowly, with a startling thoroughness, Rose’s hazed mind begins to trace the links, follow it axon by axon, to the mildly glowing source. She’s kneeling on a grating swamped in greenish light.

The source creates itself. Creation hurts.

A sharp dull ache whelms in her chest as she approaches it, the voices become muffled and mellifluous. The sensation of the day before returns, milder and slower, a bright light sizzling from inside her, beckoning her back to life. Rose feels eerily elated now, bodiless and enormously, acutely conscious of something, something that has returned to her. 

 _Two words._ She’s warm with the knowledge of them; she’s alive with it.

…

He’s startled awake as she rushes towards him, and it’s almost painful to see: involuntarily, his face contorts and his hitherto clenched fingers clutch at thin air; it occurs to Martha that he must be in pain. His familiar eyes flutter open—dusky, almost vulnerable in their intense expression; and presently clouded with some sort of a drug. He stirs.  

‘Martha,’ the Doctor says faintly, relief evident across his face. ‘Thanks Rassilon. Are you alright?’

She nods sharply, trying to assess what kind of apparatus he’s plugged to—unsuccessfully. She’s afraid of even touching him: the wires strewn about his taut sinewy frame seem to be almost nonsensically complex and almost cruelly injected into every fathomable place on his skin, feverish and glazed with sweat.

‘I’m okay,’ Martha says, in a trembling voice, ‘but what about you? What’s happened to you? Are you in pain? Who’s—’

‘It’s the Master,’ the Doctor replies, curtly, and she wonders whether speaking causes his discomfiture to increase. ‘The other Time Lord. He’s trying to get a … a revenge, kind of. On me. I don’t know, I don’t really understand what it’s all about, but … but it’s fine, nothing we can’t … deal with. I just hoped—he didn’t do anything to _you_ , did he?’

Martha shakes her head half-heartedly. ‘Not really. I don’t know, he—I woke up in the Wild West, and then—’

‘I know,’ the Doctor cuts in, voice thick, watching her through half-lidded eyes, ‘he’s made me watch.’

Perplexed, Martha can only blink. The Doctor, however, doesn’t elaborate, instead letting his eyes fall closed. Anxiously, she glances around, and then asks, in a hushed voice, ‘Where is he now? Somewhere close? Are we safe to talk here?’

The Doctor regards the ceiling mutely. ‘I believe something down there in Westworld has piqued his interest for now,’ he says stiffly. ‘So we’re fine. Temporarily.’

Cogs whirr inside Martha’s head; she deftly links the facts.

‘If he’s made you watch,’ she says carefully, ‘then you already know there’s—’

He interjects once again. His voice is flat, emotionless, ‘I know.’

Martha hesitates, her gaze falling upon the wires across the Doctor’s open shirt—the skin of his chest is pale, seems strung taut over the muscle and bone, scattered sparsely with hair. He looks tensely vulnerable, still careful as to not meet her gaze. She swallows. ‘Jack’s convinced that she’s—’

‘Jack’s wrong.’

It’s uncharacteristic for him to be this terse and listless about anything, unless he’s either deeply annoyed or equally hurt. And he has been both, to varying degrees, in the short span of their relationship; swinging between nearly contradictory moods with an unpleasant swiftness. And Martha, as usually, is unsure of how she should proceed, or if she should proceed at all. She doesn’t want to overstep: the matter seems slippery and delicate, and direr problems of the physical kind— _the spine-chilling torture chair, for instance_ —present themselves, demanding to be dealt with. _But then again …_

‘I used to think so, too,’ she says slowly, cautiously, ‘but now, I’m not so sure.’

The Doctor doesn’t respond, instead continuing to silently study the ceiling. He remains completely unmoving, teeth clenched, half-open eyes expressionless. Martha interprets it as a quiet invitation.

‘I thought she wasn’t human,’ she develops, in a rushed voice, ‘and you know that, you’ve heard me—but I just want to say, I don’t know anymore. I mean, she might not be human, not … _technically_. But she started remembering things, odd things that made little sense, and she started saying things and … I don’t know. She felt different then. And I thought that perhaps—perhaps there’s something more to it. Something less obvious.’

Again, she’s answered with silence. The Doctor has closed his eyes. Slightly alarmed, she ventures, ‘Doctor, I really think you should—’

‘That wasn’t Rose.’ Harshly.

Martha licks her lips nervously. ‘But how can you be so sure? You … you missed her so much, and after everything that’s happened, isn’t it worth a tr—’

‘Because it’s not possible, Martha, and I would really appreciate it if you stopped snuffling into my private life, which is none of your business,’ he snarls, louder than she’s anticipated. And colder, much colder.

He looks at her, eyes hurt and full of anger, and Martha swallows. 

…

She gives the general impression, the Master thinks, of someone thoroughly deranged. The light flares her hair into a halo around her head as she kneels.

‘ _These violent delights_ ,’ she whispers, ‘ _have violent ends_.’

The Master bristles. ‘Shakespeare. Fucking _great_ , Rose, have you hit your head on the ground? The _hell_ are you—’ 

‘Oh, but you don’t understand, do you?’ Her voice remains oddly vacant. She smiles a delirious, languid smile.

‘Don’t understand _what?_ ’ the Master asks gruffly.

She crawls up to him from the place where she’s fallen over, hands and knees on sandy ground, and pulls him down by the hem of his suit, so that their faces are levelled. Too surprised to object, he’s instantly nauseated by the cloying scent of freshly drawn blood reeking from her clothes. There’s something vacant in her eyes, as well, as though she’s looking past him, into something he can’t possibly see; and a sheen of glistening sweat on her forehead.

When she leans in, her human-inspired breath is burning hot against his skin. The Master shudders—but unnervingly, he appears to be paralysed, physically unable to recoil from her.

‘I could see everything. All that is,’ she whispers reverently into his ear, ‘all that was. All that ever will be.’ Her voice becomes caustic, ‘Rings any bells, _darling_?’

The Master turns rigid. A seeping coldness creeps into his veins. ‘What has he done? The stupid fucker, what has he done to you—is he _fucking mad_? The fuck does he think he’s—’

Rose laughs, cutting him off. It’s a low, unhurried sound, almost sultry. She leans away, still kneeling, and looking at him from half-closed lids—her eyes are shining now, and it is plainly _wrong_. Unnatural—a radiant tinge of afterglow in the very pupils, some elusive energy sprouting to life. She touches a warm hand to cool-skinned his neck, and for the first time, the painfully stiffened Master feels … scared? 

 _Something here is out of control_ , he thinks stupidly. _Something here—_

‘What the fuck,’ he breathes out, writhing in his invisible restraints. ‘Analysis! Freeze all motor functions! Freeze all—’  

Rose remains unresponsive, her unseeing eyes fixed on him and slowly becoming liquid light, spilling over the irises as she says, ‘You’re wrong. It wasn’t him. It was _me_.’

_Why didn’t it work? Why doesn’t it work, are they too far away from—_

She tilts her head and stares ahead, suddenly both strangely mesmerising and _alien_ to him. 

Her hand tightens leisurely around his throat and the Master begins to choke.

He’s gradually and incredulously starting to believe that he’s about to be forced into an entirely unplanned regeneration due asphyxiation by a demonic fucking Juliet Capulet—when the light in her eyes dies away, as abruptly as it came.

She swiftly focuses them back on him, and smiles. It’s a rather nasty smile. The Master swallows.

‘What was I going to do ... oh, _yes_ ,’ she says quietly, blinking.

‘What the fuck,’ the Master says, for the third time, trying to catch his breath.

Rose Tyler—or what _used_ to be Rose Tyler and has now apparently evolved into a mildly sociopathic alien witch—narrows her eyes.

‘We were about to talk business,’ she says, voice startlingly cold. ‘Well, that’s easy. I want _out_.’

…

He instantly feels guilty. She’s standing there: small and brittle in her white hospital gown, tense to the point of breaking, doing everything in her might not only to keep herself together—but to try and keep him, too.

And he thinks of all the times she’s had to suffer because of him—because of his coldness, his reckless attitude or because of the guilt that, plaguing him, transformed him into something even he can barely recognise or reign over. He thinks of all the times she’s taken the blow and then turned the other cheek, faithful it will sting less.

And what has she done to deserve it? What could she _possibly_ have?

‘I’m sorry,’ the Doctor says thickly, remorse constricting his throat. ‘Martha, I am _so_ sorry.’

She nods without speaking, lips pursed. Her face is inscrutable.

‘How can I help you?’ she then asks, voice tight but even. ‘With the wires and restraints, I mean. Is there a way of taking them away without hurting you?’

‘No,’ the Doctor says curtly, and cracks a self-depreciating smile. ‘But it has to be done even so. I’ll be a big boy, I won’t cry.’

Martha holds his gaze for a moment, still looking impassive. Then she nods curtly, and sets about disentangling him from the cluster of veiny wires, quietly and with a meticulous thoroughness. He doesn’t flinch, but merely watches her, wary and doggedly resisting the inviting inertia of the drug-inspired haze.

With each moment, the silence becomes increasingly uncomfortable.

‘Bit like I’m a patient’, the Doctor finally says, croakily, and musters up a feeble smile. ‘Bit like you’re the doctor.’

‘When it’s over,’ Martha replies in a hushed and hurried voice, not looking at him. ‘I’m not going to keep travelling with you. Sorry.’

A leaden weight settles in the Doctor’s stomach. He remains quiet, but nods, ever so lightly. Martha’s fingers keep working on the wires. She doesn’t look up.

…

The warm feeling of omnipotence dissipates gradually as the elevator moves downwards with an ominous rattle of hinges and chains. Rose becomes increasingly numb.

She’s walked steadily through the deserted, ghastly Escalante, the muzzle of her gun pointed at the back of the Master’s head. She’s climbed the three creaking steps and walked through the cold stillness of the hollow little church, and she’s waited in complete silence for the Master to open the confessional and step inside. She has watched him press his hand to the fingerprint scanner on one of the  ostensibly wooden wall.

Subconsciously, she feels like she’s doing it wrong, somehow. Whispery words ring out in her head: _And I haven't. Which makes me the better person, don't you think? They can shoot me dead, but the moral high-ground is mine_ —but the buzzing farrago of newly retrieved information makes it impossible for Rose to think clear, and this inability makes her feel scared.

So she muffles them and quietens the voices; detaching herself from the self-discovery, from the memories and feelings awaiting her across the frail precipice—just for now, just until she manages to _get out_. It seems to her only natural, a strategic move—like survival instinct. She self-inflicts on herself the thin layer of unknowing to delay the shock of full realisation. Delay the awakening until she is safe with it, and _alone_.

And there’s something, after all, undeniably reassuring in the thought of wielding a gun—even alongside a burning awareness of the fact that she would not be able to use it on the Master, no matter what he has previously intended to do with her—and so Rose forces her hand to remain steady.

The Master, on his part, remains unnervingly _blithe_ all the way through, which is entirely unsuitable, Rose firmly reckons, for someone with a muzzle of a gun pointed at the back of their head.

But then again, the Master doesn’t seem entirely stable, either. 

The elevator descends and plunges in, for a lingering moment, into almost absolute darkness—only to emerge, seconds later, into a vastly different kind of light. It’s cold and mildly blue, and spills into the elevator through a grubby window.

The Master pushes the door open and steps out into the corridor.

A LED-light panel flickers on the ceiling. Rose holds her breath. The corridor angles and meanders, splintered by closed doors and doors set ajar, spiked with a sharp scent of chemicals and a stuffy stench of rotting; and then it glides inconspicuously into the estuary of a cold, deserted hall. The Master walks on, undeterred, towards a dimly lit window looming ahead. His footsteps echo in the lifeless air.

When they enter, Rose lets out the breath she hasn’t been aware of holding. They’re in an office—or a feeble semblance thereof, with white-tiled floor and walls, shelves stocked with various and silvery objects, and a similarly silvery medical table located neatly in the centre. It’s there, finally, that the Master comes to a halt.

He runs his hand languidly across the smooth surface of the table, seemingly pondering something in quiet. It almost looks like a caress, the kind of touch one could give their lover, and not a piece of furniture.

It occurs to Rose that something is entirely, inevitably wrong.

‘Why did you create me?’ she asks, impulsively. Her voice wavers, bearing no resemblance to the tinny lilt of the Bad Wolf, but instead coming out childish and nervous, ‘I was dead. We’ve never even met. So why bother doing all this?’

The Master shakes his head slowly, but Rose obviously can’t see his expression. ‘You’re not supposed to know that,’ he says with a quiet sigh. Then he adds, in an even quieter voice, ‘I thought we were past this little practice by now. But you can’t take the hint, can you?’

Her grip on the gun tightens. ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying. And I’m—I’m not just some empty doll of yours. I remember—’ she trails off, taken aback by the sound she would hardly expect: the Master is chuckling.

‘Rose, I’m afraid you remain under a certain delusion,’ he says softly, still facing away from her, and drumming his fingers lightly on the metal surface. ‘The delusion being the idea that I will let you walk free. I’ll do no such thing—and don’t let yourself be fooled that you can do anything to me with this little toy of yours.’

He turns, and smiles to her, almost fondly. Almost. ‘The rules of this place won’t allow you to do that.’

Rose’s heart leaps into her throat. She breathes shakily through the nose, and then slowly lowers the gun. She knows, somehow, that he is not lying. And she finds herself irrevocably unable to resist the thought of yielding her rebellion to him, numb and devoid of any will of struggle.

 _No_ , a faint voice inside her head whispers from behind the veil of self-protection, _this is not right. No, don’t let it happen. Not again._

But the Master is talking, and Rose cannot help focusing entirely on his words.

‘You’ve asked me for your purpose earlier, Rose.’ He clicks his tongue, narrows his eyes slightly at her. ‘Well—here’s the answer. You’re my perfect argument.’

The lingering, persistently and helplessly fighting spirit of self-awareness shouts relentlessly inside her head and claws at her chest. With enormous effort, Rose speaks, ‘Argument?’

He stares at her with his cold eyes. ‘I didn’t realise, but now I do,’ he says. ‘You will give my revelation the optimum intensity.’

Carefully, slowly. Painfully, and against everything in her and outside of her, Rose says, ‘No, I will _not_.’

He snorts, shakes his head. ‘Ah, but that’s the point. You, _honey_ , don’t have a say.’

He moves towards her swiftly like a preying cat, outstretched nimble-fingered hands opened as thought to cradle her head, sharklike green eyes alight with a manic sort of determination. Rose is suffused with cold dread; fear pierces through her inch by inch as her muscles stiffen and thought is paralysed. She’s inside her body, and yet she has not control over it, an abstract witness encapsulated in a hollow vessel. In the last flash of clarity, she knows that her hazily recomposing memories will be stolen from her yet again, as they have been, time after time, this time forev—

There’s a deafening sound of a fired shot and a millisecond of utter tranquillity. The Master’s lips part, his eyes flutter. Then he sinks heavily to his knees in front of her, and then he falls to her feet.

Rose lets out a shuddering breath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm _dying to hear what you're thinking!_ What have you noticed? What do you think's about to happen?


	6. which alters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _‘I’m in a dream, and I need your help,’ Rose whispers, tenaciously. ‘I don’t know what to do.’_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh dear. We're finally here. I can't believe it. 
> 
> A significant part of this chapter is ... the cornerstone of this entire story. You know, that one scene around which an entire narrative gradually builds? I wrote _these violent delights_ with the thought of being able to include this chapter in its epicentre. 
> 
> I do hope you’ll enjoy reading at least half as much as I enjoyed writing it. And I want to thank every lovely person that finds the time to read these violent delights. There’s a lot of my heart in it, and it really means the world. :)
> 
> P.S. I really, really recommend rereading the prologue before reading this chapter. It'll make much more sense.

‘Rose, we need to get out of here _, now_.’

Jack has lowered the muzzle of his rifle, still exuding a faint cloud of smoke, and now alternates between casting furtive glances outside, into the darkness, and at her.

But Rose doesn’t move, as though glued to her spot. Her eyes don’t leave the Master’s limp body, sprawled ungracefully on the floor at her feet. One of his cheeks is touching it, his mouth parted and eyes closed.  He looks asleep, and as though he’s about to wake up any given moment at that. A shallow, dreamless slumber. 

Rose blinks. Senses return gradually to her stiffened fingers, and she slowly regains her meticulously preserved awareness. She feels cold.

‘Rose?’ Jack urges, impatient. ‘We really have to—’

‘What if he regenerates?’ she says aloud, cutting him off.

There’s a moment of rapt silence. Then Jack says, quietly, ‘What?’

She stares at her own hands, morbidly pallid in the greyish light; one of them still clutching at the unused gun. ‘I heard it. I’m sure—two hearts. He’s a … He’s going to regenerate.’ 

She finally looks up, briefly—Jack looks oddly out of place in the cold laboratory, with his haggard shirt and scruffy face. He blinks, seemingly thrown off balance, either by her sudden knowledge or the idea itself.

‘Perhaps,’ he admits reluctantly. ‘But that doesn’t change the—’

‘I don’t think he should be alone,’ Rose blurts out.

She doesn’t have to raise her gaze to know Jack is incredulous; his utter silence speaks volumes. She bites her lip, continuing to avoid his gaze, and instead studies the exposed patch of skin behind the Master’s ear. A frail veiny light flickers there, mildly golden, before dimming out. And Rose thinks, _it’s beginning_.

‘Rose, are you insane?’ Jack splutters, apparently coming to his senses. ‘He’s—he’s just tried to force you to become some … some goddamned cold-blooded assassin, he’s forced you to obey him and endangered _all_ of us, God only knows in the name of _what_ , and we don’t even know what he’s done with the D—’

‘Still,’ Rose says, in a slightly bolder voice, ‘I don’t think he should be alone.’

She looks straight into Jack’s eyes. His jaw twitches.

But before either of them can speak again, a stinging red blare of flashing light floods them; a shrewd howl of an alarm sets out, piercing the air. The Master on the floor groans and moves, trying to rise, twitching like a blind animal caught in a trap.

Jack leaps into action in an instant, much more lithely than one would suspect, and much more efficiently: he pushes Rose out of the office, and into the dimly echoing hall. 

‘Run,’ he instructs her in a commandeering voice, ‘find the Doctor.’ 

This time, she doesn’t linger.

… 

But the tangle of repeatedly crossing, self-contradicting corridors and the relentless glass confuse her. The memories continue to return tidally, to a swaying rhythm—as though from a great distance. Voices identify, scenes unfold, and yet Rose still feels like a witness and not a participant, and she knows, she _knows_ , that she needs to cross this border in order to understand.

She slowly draws to a halt before one of the glass-bound compartments. There are two austere chairs inside, and a sharp blue glare illuminating them like a spotlight aimed at the key scene of a theatre play. At the _actors_.

Something inside Rose’s head brightens. She nearly cries out in joy. She rushes in through the elusive opening in the glass wall; and flings herself at her spot. _It’s almost right_ , she thinks deliriously, _I’ve almost got it right. I just need—I just need to focus very hard and then—_

She shuts her eyes, clenches her fists. _I’m in a dream._ _I’m in a dream. I’m in a dream._

‘I’m in a dream, and I need your help,’ Rose whispers, tenaciously. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

‘Don’t you, Rose? You’ve got everything you need now. The circle is almost complete.’

She opens her eyes.

And he’s there, unaccountably. He’s there, and he’s looking at her in his evenly calm manner, and sitting in his chair as though nothing has changed. As though she hasn’t changed. Warm relief nearly chokes her.

‘I know,’ Rose says quietly, smiling in spite of her despair, and leaning instinctively towards him like a cat leaning into sunlight, ‘but I don’t think I can do it all on my own. I don’t—you _need_ to help me.’ Her voice is pleading.

He remains characteristically unflustered. ‘I can’t. You know that.’

‘ _Please_ ,’ Rose almost whines, her fingers curling helplessly in her lap. ‘I’m so confused. And I know you can help me, you’re the _only_ one who can help me. I know you do, you’re—you’re the one who’s been guiding me. A voice in my head, all this time, even before Martha and Jack, ever since I was made … our conversations! I was talking to you all this time, hearing you—not _him_. Not the Master. It was you, you made me remember. So you must—you have to—’

‘I _can’t_ help you, Rose,’ he interrupts in his familiar, sternly cadenced voice. He sounds almost rueful. ‘You know I can’t.’

‘There’s too much of it all,’ Rose counters through her tears, trying adamantly to disregard his refusal, ‘and I just can’t make sense of it. I’m trying, but I need help. Please.’

‘I _can’t_ help you, and _why_ is that?’ he wheedles in response, still unperturbed. ‘You need to _remember_ , Rose.’

She fights it. ‘I don’t—’

But then she _does_ , and it’s almost too horrendous to accept.

_(‘No one’s meant to do that.’)_

A vibrating awareness arrives in the full spectre, for the first time genuinely completing the circle. The epiphany is neither violent nor striking; it has been seeping into her gradually and now falls into place with quiet and seamless precision.  Rose’s fingers uncurl on her lap. Her mouth falls open, her lids flutter. 

She breathes out. Even the air has a different taste.

His eyes, blue and bright, watch her unblinkingly. He now appears to be composed solely of the dust hanging in the bluish air, translucent and unreal: sharp nose, short-trimmed hair, a leather jacket.

‘Because you’re not real,’ Rose whispers. ‘Because you’re just a memory.’

He’s smiling. Such a perfect, unscathed idea of him.

Rose inhales sharply. ‘Because I killed you.’

An involuntary and unrealised tear spills over and runs down her left cheek, burning hot against the skin. 

She’s seated on a spartan chair in an empty lab compartment bound with translucent glass, staring into dead, dust-weaved air. The LED panel above her head flickers abruptly, shattering light into tiny speckles. He’s no longer sitting in front of her. He doesn’t exist.

From the crystal-clear surface of the wall ahead, her own reflection stares back—Rose Tyler. Alone. _Alive_.

(And her eyes are different. They burn.)

‘I understand now,’ the Bad Wolf says quietly, ‘You weren’t guiding me. You were never even there in the first place. It was just me. Just me, waking myself up. Recalling myself. Remembering.’

She closes her eyes, and when she opens them again, the eerie light has died. Rose looks at herself and lets out a damp, caustic chuckle. ‘Well, I remember now. I _bloody_ well do.’

…

Slowly, excruciatingly, the Master drags himself to his knees, claws at the wall, and pulls himself upwards. Then he stands, trembling and panting heavily, and watches the puddle of blood at his feet.

Then he starts laughing.

…

Rose’s legs carry her, pliant and almost unthinking, out of the compartment. His image still lingers precariously somewhere in the phosphenes if she closes her eyes for long enough. Pointedly, she doesn’t.

And then she is running again, purposefully and steadily, along the rows of glass-bound little prisons and slick floor under her dusty boots; stumbling into corners and skidding on the bends. She feels as though something is beckoning her, and doesn’t stop until she falls through a half-open metallic door; into a darker and softer space.

Panting heavily, Rose takes in the new location: it’s a spacious, if dim, room with a giant screen strewn across one of the walls. There’s a repeating loop of a scene playing out, soundless and all the while intensely gruesome—a sequence cut out from her recent past: the shaggy assailant grabs her, limp and dazed, and drags up from the ground to her feet, in order to push a knife straight through her abdomen. As Rose’s hand reflexively moves to her belly, the scene stutters to a sharp end with a frozen still of herself—screaming with pain while a yellow radiance gathers in the air about her—and then replays. She feels sick.

‘What the _hell_ ,’ she breathes out. Her hand clutches around the stiffened cloth over her stomach, pressing into the skin. She can remember the pain now, sharp and quick and then instantly, blissfully muffled, like a spell.

But what came afterwards? She’s done something, something that screams _Bad Wolf_ , but what? And who’s been watching?

 _Well, the Master, for sure but_ —Rose’s eyes fall upon an abandoned seat in the centre of the room, right by a red-lit console. A tangle of detached wires hangs loosely in the air, along with a leather strap seemingly meant to hold down whomever is to be constrained in the chair. Inexplicably entranced, Rose walks up to it and glides a hand across the leathery surface.

There’s a vague scent lingering in the air. It stirs a chord of memory within her, which then unravels into a desperate, urgent recognition: something concentrated and unnameable, a connotation impossible to name. _Tangerines_ , Rose thinks almost absently, _and life; lush as wet grass, with something burning at the edges. The vast dusty space between universes_. _Home_. She knows it, and she attributes a naïve simplification she’s come to perceive it as: _this, this is the scent of time itself._

Something large and fluttering rises up inside Rose’s chest, its trembling moth-like wings muffling her struggling heart. The scent seems to intensify to the point of becoming a memory, and the memory is drawing her into the present. At the other end of the room, there’s a looming outline of door; pale light spills in in a wan trickle. 

Two heartbeats, and inhale. Rose’s hand falls limply to her side as she begins walking.

…

Martha has developed a litany, and she clings to it with almost holy reverence. _You asshole. You bloody asshole. Bloody-Stupid-Time-Lord-Egomaniac-Asshole._

(She’s not _quite_ sure to whom it pertains more accurately: the Doctor or the Master. She suspects the answer might lie somewhere neatly in between.)

The Doctor’s plans, she’s always thought, generally tend to border with outright naivety, sometimes brushing gleefully past equally outright lunacy. Sometimes being a varyingly intense concentration of both. But up to this point, Martha has also thought herself somewhat dependent both on him and these plans. Somewhat _glad_ to be.

 _Not any-fucking-more_ , she thinks ferociously, breaking the cycle of a litany, as she pushes herself through the cobweb-lined inside of the emergency ventilation shaft.

Usually, Martha is not particularly prone to swearing, being a little old-fashioned in that sense and opting for more elegant euphemisms. But somewhere deep down her brain, there’s a gate, and she’s mildly aware of the fact that once the gate is opened, she could easily put a sailor to shame.

Now the gate is slowly, precariously swaying ajar.

(Picture this: Martha and the Doctor, standing arm to arm in front of a shaft opening he’s just managed to de-assemble with the help of a spanner that apparently fits inside his trousers pockets along with a string of equally suspicious accessories. _None_ of which has ever been mentioned while needed. A quick scan of the surroundings has provided them with a clear picture of just how well locked-in they are, inside the Master’s brave new world, including being surrounded with radiation-proof doors and a tangled loop of mutually self-activating possibly-lethal traps and shrieking alarming-God-knows-who alarms. Which have, in fact, been activated.

Then picture this: The Doctor, _clearly_ still suffering from some sort of nerve-pain and _clearly_ putting up a show meant to prove to her that he is, in fact, _not_ suffering from any sort of nerve-pain at all; determinedly not wincing as he tries to assess the percentage probability of his shoulders, legs and entire expansively spindly physique managing to be crammed inside the aforementioned tiny shaft opening without uttering a blood-curdling scream that would notify Martha that _clearly_ , he has been, in fact, suffering from some sort of nerve-pain after all.

Now picture Martha, selflessly volunteering to crawl up to the management centre of the building’s power supply, and picture the Doctor’s profoundly guilty, soft and thankful smile that even _now_ manages to make her insides warm up.)

A hairy spider crawls up the shaft wall right next to her left ear. The sonic screwdriver is slick from her sweaty hands.

‘Goddamnedbloodyfuckingasshole,’ Martha says, shrilly.

…

The Doctor drops the spanner.

It’s a slow occurrence: full of cluttered half-seconds cramming into one another as time uncoils around him to capture the moment in an excruciating cluster of precision, ensuring that not a single splinter escapes his memory later on.

(It’s a chronological occurrence, too. First there are footsteps, then there’s a harsh sound of dusty boots skidding to a halt on a smooth-scrubbed floor, then there’s a startled breath, and almost— _almost_ the sound of rapid heartbeats in the air. Then he’s _turning_ , and then he’s _seeing_.)

The Doctor has dropped the spanner.

(It’s _not_ an unexpected occurrence. All this time, he’s known: he’s known there had to be a Rose. The Master has told him, of course, but he needn’t have done so: it would’ve be obvious even so. It would all be _pointless_ without her, after all: painful, but not nearly targeted enough to actually break him.

He’s known, with an increasing conviction, that it was bound to end along these lines: for _her_ to emerge out of the blur when he least expects her, to stand in front of him so utterly impossible—and have him be entirely conscious of it. He’s known, and yet it’s lessened none of the spontaneous and overwhelming pain that wells up inside him and cuts away his breath.)

She stands with her shoulders squared, in a bloodstained shirt and horse riding trousers, a gun strapped to her belt, bottle-blonde hair tussled and sprinkled with dust. Her chest is heaving.

(He’s known, and he’s hoped, naively, that she would look at him and not recognise him; and it will be painful, immensely so, but understandable. A shallow deception. Another cheap trick of the Master’s. Another punch in the gut in a life-worth of them.) 

She’s looking straight at him.

‘ _Doctor_ ,’ she speaks out, voice breathy and wan, ‘oh my God, it’s _you_. I found you.’

And his hearts, foolish to have kept beating, break at the very sound.

He doesn’t reply, he _can’t_ —his throat is so tight it’s a marvel he’s still able to breathe without the kick of respiratory bypass, and yet he feels as though the air about him is turning into thick and muddled tar. He stares at her. 

‘Doctor?’ she repeats, hopefully: big warm eyes fixed on his face, lips smiling a nervously soft half-smile he knows so well. ‘It’s me, it’s—you remember me, don’t you? Couldn’t have been that long, I mean, you still look … uh, Rose Tyler, London, Powell Estate? _Henrik’_ s basement?’

She laughs, somewhat anxiously, flashing her teeth in a hint of her trademark grin.

 _Please_ , the Doctor thinks fatuously, _be a hallucination._

‘Wait. It’s not like you think,’ is what he says aloud, and his own—hoarse and weary—voice seems to him disembodied and abstract. _Alien_. ‘This is—this is wrong. You need to … you need to trust me on this. It’s not like you think. _You’re_ not who you think.’

He carefully avoids using her name. He avoids _thinking_ it.

A shadow crosses her face. She swallows.

‘How can you know what I’m thinkin’?’ she asks in a tiny voice.

She sounds young, very young. She sounds like she’s nineteen, and holding on shakily to her sturdy phone as she glances sideways at a slowly looming Dalek. She sounds like the thoughts he doesn’t dare think except in the darkness, when he’s only half-awake, cocooned in dull silence, trying to forget himself in fitful bouts of shallow dreams. She sounds like _her_. 

Gruffly, he retorts, ‘It’s simply not possible—I’m sure the Master worked on you with utmost care, he even ... told me as much. But no matter what … no matter how carefully, it’s just—it can’t be. Both of us need to acknowledge that.’

She understands now, he can sense it—there’s a new strain to her posture, and a new tenseness to her muscles. Her eyes are fixed upon him, unmoving and alarmed.

‘And it _wasn’t_ like that,’ she says slowly, almost as though she was sieving words one by one, wary of each syllable, ‘not at first. I … I thought I was someone else, like he wanted me to. That girl from Sweetwater, waiting for her father and … But then something _changed_ and I, I remembered all this … all this … _everything_.’

Not a muscle in his face twitches. ‘I’m afraid it was all programmed it,’ he says calmly. ‘All of it. He’s very clever. You wouldn’t even realise … in fact, you probably didn’t. You probably _don’t_. It’s just a trick, though. Borrowed memories, meticulously copied cephalic and neural activity matrices—but nothing else. I …’ he breaks off, tenses even more.

The words taste disgusting and shameful on his tongue, ‘I’m _sorry_.’

There’s a moment of an almost ringing silence. The entire situation, he thinks, has to itself an almost dreamlike, eerie quality of poignant impossibility. 

‘But it’s _not_ ,’ Rose then insists, voice rising slightly as she futilely searches his face. ‘He didn’t know. He was just as surprised as … look, Doctor, it’s not like _you_ think. I swear. I remembered it, everything _changed_ —the Bad Wolf, the _voices_ —honestly, he couldn’t have predicted it, he couldn’t have known—’

‘You underestimate him,’ the Doctor interjects, curtly.

‘You underestimate _me_ ,’ Rose retorts, voice growing louder and suddenly sharp. ‘Wouldn’t be the first time, either. At Canary Wharf—’

He steps forward and she trails off, almost backing away but not quite. Fear flashes across her face, and he hates it, he hates _himself_ , fucking resents and _loathes_.

‘ _Don’t_.’ His voice continues to feel foreign to him, stony and very harsh. Hurtful—but intentionally so. He needs her to recoil, needs her to recognise his resistance. He needs to scare her away, repel her—it will be easier that way, a smoother, less painful solution for them both. He can’t let this twisted situation evolve any further, can’t let either of them believe any of the spiteful naïve lies woven by the Master.

‘I advise you, don’t cling to these false memories,’ he adds, coldly, drawing even closer, ‘It’s not going to do anyone any good—and again, I suggest we both accept that before anyone gets hurt.’

(And again, _oh_ , how he hates himself for it.)

Rose’s lower lip trembles. ‘But I don’t—’

‘Listen, I need you to understand one thing,’ he interrupts in the same dispassionately harsh voice, motioning a sharp line in the air between them. Her lips are pursed as she follows the movement with her eyes.

‘Rose died. I watched her die. And that’ll be the end of it.’

She watches him with burning eyes for a moment, chest rising and falling to an inaudible rhythm, looking far too _alive_ and far too _betrayed_ for his liking. Something in the Doctor’s gut tightens.

‘But I’m _right here_ ,’ she says in a breaking voice, and the futility of it nearly knocks the breath out of him.

He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have the strength to do so—all he can do is watch, silently, _her_ hope evaporating from her silently and gradually, leaving behind only something in the way of despair.

He looks away. Fixes his eyes on the shiny black tablet in his hands. He hasn’t the heart to launch it and click the ‘Rose Tyler’ profile open. He hasn’t the heart to be proved right. The silence stretches on, muffling and thick, into the clusters of seconds that he busies himself with pointless counting.

There’s a soft hiss; glass walls materialise around them, locking them in.

…

One, two, three— _restart_. Welcome to the world!

Reality blooms achingly around him; sound and smell and clotted blood melting back inside veins. Axons pushing through thoughts and _I’m alive again_ , Jack thinks glumly, staring and the yet-blurry ceiling and rasping shallow open-mouthed breaths, _which also means I have died. Again. Oh, joy._

Somewhat mechanically, he forces himself up from the horizontal position and winces at the strain of stiffened joints. A bone cracks somewhere.  

He seems to be in some sort of an underground lab, or maybe an office. It’s lit sparsely with a bluish electrical panel that gives everything a sharp edge: there’s blood on the floor, and momentarily Jack isn’t entirely sure whose blood it is. He performs the obligatory and half-hearted inspection of himself and finds no fitting wounds.

 _There’s some sort of a very sad pattern occurring here_ , he thinks, wincing once again. 

There is, however, the matter of a rifle strewn carelessly across the room—because Jack remembers _firing_ the rifle. He remembers running, and then barging in, and then pointing the muzzle and—

He stiffens. There’s blood, and there’s a rifle, and there’s himself.

Only, there’s no sign of the Master.

…

**_(present time)_ **

‘But you never understood choices, did you?’

 _Stop,_ the Doctor pleads, _stop, please. Stop before I go insane._

She’s standing in front of him, and she’s so achingly familiar: familiar slope of nose, hollow of clavicle poking from beneath her tussled shirt, familiar bitten lips and pronounced cheekbones.

Her previous despair has morphed into outright anger, raw and helpless and accumulated at _him_. That’s familiar as well.

( _‘I’ve made my choice a long time ago.’_ )

‘You don’t _get_ to call me what you don’t believe I am,’ she repeats vehemently. ‘I can see it in your eyes, when you say that, you know? Like ... like you hate the very _ground_ I stand on. Like you can’t bear the thought of my existence. Because I’m _wrong_. An aberration. _Rose_ ,’ she spits out the name as though it burned her tongue, ‘and yet _not_ Rose. Dead, undead, wanted, unwanted. Not _real,_ in any case, or not _real enough_. Like—like a nightmare, one of those horrid nightmares you have at nights, and you scream and you soundproof your goddamned stupid room, and don’t want anyone to know that you can feel as _low_ and _human_ as you do then. And all you want, all you could ever hope for, is them, me included, to have never existed at all.’

Each of her words feels like a slap on the face. _There’s irony somewhere in this_ , he half-thinks, _connecting to her mother—no, not her mother, Rose’s mother,_ she _had no mother, she was brought to life by_ —but he can’t follow through, unable to focus on anything but her at the moment, as sacrilegious as that sounds for a high-level multi-pathway sentient being like a Time Lord.

Her eyes are brimming with tears, and he can’t help fixating on the unnerving question of whether they’re real. Of whether she can feel them like a living person would. He has the unthinkable urge to reach out and touch her face and hands; simply to ascertain whether they’re moist and warm, and whether she would lean into his touch or push him violently away.

He doesn’t. She keeps talking, voice choked and heated. ‘It’s like hell, isn’t it? It’s like hell incarnated. And you just want it _gone_. You just want it to stop.’

He can’t bear to look at her; can’t bear to look away.

‘But you’re better than that, aren’t you?’ she whispers. ‘You’re _good_. So you put on a show.’

 _Don’t_ , the Doctor thinks, _please, don’t. Please._

‘You brace yourself. You think, let’s _indulge_ her. Poor … creature. It’s not her fault, is it? You won’t blame her, _you’re not that conceited!_ ’ she laughs, a startling, bitter sound. ‘Let’s make it good for her, then! Until it’s over. Until she’s dealt with. Gone.’

Something powerful whelms up inside him, something enormous and stifling, and he can’t stop himself. ‘That’s not—’ 

‘Oh, _yes_ it fucking is.’

He can’t seem to gather a sufficient answer from the evasive non-truths another contradiction would require.

In the following raw silence, she stares past him at the glass wall, and then continues, in an uneven voice. ‘It’s unfair, you know? Just simply unfair. But you don’t even see that, do you? You’re just like him, just like ... _fuck you both_ , for thinking I’ll have no say in this. Again and again, but this stops now, do you hear me? Because I will. I _do_.’

The Doctor swallows.

Rose collects herself somewhat to continue, wiping furiously at her eyes. ‘I have a right to decide about myself. You have to acknowledge that. You _have_ to. And I’m not—I’m not asking of you— _anything_ else. Nothing at all, I don’t want anything from you, do you understand?’

Lids twitch over her eyes, bright from tears—half-green, half-hazel—and her lips purse as she tries to keep them from trembling. He doesn’t know what frightens him more: her words, or those small twitches and flutterings, tiny betrayals of her body, just beyond her capabilities of self-control. So helpless. So _human_.

( _Not quite human_ , the Doctor thinks, weakly.)

‘I know now, that it must hurt you,’ she’s saying now. ‘God, I know, and I’m _sorry_. I’m going to keep saying it, I’m _so sorry_ , so much you have no idea. It’s eating me alive. Because I would _never_ cause you pain, not voluntarily. All I know, all I can _tell_ , is Rose. And she would—she’d never—’

Words seem to fail her for a moment, or perhaps she simply becomes too overwhelmed with emotion. The Doctor’s hands are clenched painfully at his sides.

She shuts her eyes and exhales shakily. ‘So you say I’m not her, so _be_ it. I can learn to accept that. I _can_. But I’m sorry, I can’t do anything about it. I don’t know anything else, I don’t know—I don’t know _how_ to be able to not be her. And as it is, I would never—I just want you to understand that. _I want you safe_ , yeah? I don’t want—I never wanted _this_.’

Her eyes seem to burn now. ‘But the worst thing is; I get I don’t even really deserve it all. This … this mess, this pain. It’s … it’s not mine, is it? Like you said, and Martha, and I know that … that I have no right to it. These … these memories, they are just lies. I don’t even _have_ them,’ she trails off with a breathy bitter laugh, which comes out more like a sob.

‘And still, it’s _all_ I have. How twisted is that? It’s like I finally woke up to it all, from this long and awful nightmare, and it made me feel … it hurt so fucking _much_ , but it made me feel like a person. Like … like myself. For the first time. Does it even make sense?’

 _(Infinities of multiverses, sprouting about them like wispy nocturnal flowers, shutting and opening; scattering impossibilities. Lightyears and aeons, and galaxies and universes, and has it all ever been_ this _kind before? To him? Has he ever been given an entirely selfish second chance?)_

He says, in a barely audible voice, ‘Yes, I think it does.’

_(And who’s to say chances can’t ache, they will ache brilliantly, they will ache and burn like dying stars, transforming into something new. The question is, would he dare reach out? Could he?)_

She inhales sharply and nods, tears streaming down her cheeks and leaving smudges of ink round her eyes. It looks familiar. It _feels_ familiar.

Rose’s name fills his mind like a scent, ubiquitous and intoxicating, inevitable. He tries to calm his hearts, futilely—there’s already a black hole between them and he’s counting the seconds before he’s drawn in.

‘And I remember it so vividly now,’ she says, looking right at him with her watery eyes. ‘I _swear_. I remember you. I remember running with you, and I remember your … laugh, your hands, your _voice_ , I … Gamestation. I remember _burning_. And then Canary Wharf. I remember that I clutched at the lever, but it was so rough my fingers bled, and then there was this big … pressure from every side. And I tried to hold on, and reach for you, but I just … I couldn’t _breathe_. And it just broke my heart, because I promised you that I was gonna stay, and then I couldn’t.’

_(Realities dying and lapping one over another, tangents, bright and burning, singular and lonely in millions of years, halved by those intervals of yearning for utility. Does he get to win at this gamble, just once? But—who else could?)_

The name pulls at the edges of his thinning conviction, and finally seeps outside, rounded and fluttery, ‘ _Rose_.’

And the Doctor gives in; to the pull of gravity or the law of motion—if either even truly _exists_ —he’s not sure. He falls forward, into the darkly laughing void. _Come and get me_ , he could as well whisper, _come and condemn it. I don’t care. I don’t care._  

He pulls her to himself and kisses; roughly. It’s a new thing: that he hasn’t done before, not in a reality more substantial than ghostlike traces of possibilities he’s guiltily, hungrily projected during those half-consciously thick nights, when he’s felt lonely and breathless and inexcusable; the most tantalised by the finite and unbridgeable distance to her bedroom. And it’s a messy, urgent thing, and all the same so blithely _titillating_ —for a moment, just a _moment_ contained in her feverish lips pressed to his, he feels absolutely absolved from time.  

He lets her go, but she doesn’t move away, her eyes closed and mouth parted. No, she leans back in—almost as if she is drawn by the same unnamed phenomenon. And _God_ , how he’s missed it: Rose, with her frantic human heartbeat; spilling lavish warmth and this odd sensation, like pinpricks, across his skin.

‘T’ _hell_ are you doing?’ she demands weakly, voice muffled by the fabric of his shirt. ‘Tha’s not how it works. You shouldn’t be—you shouldn’t be _kissing_ me now, you should be shouting and pushing me away and saying that I’m not—’

 _No_ , the Doctor thinks when his arms tighten around her. There exists, after all, something unspeakably superior to any thought: _touch_. Just touch. When he closes his eyes and inhales, there is no moral doubt or unresolved guilt _—_ there’s Rose _,_ just Rose, pressed against him, somehow, miraculously alive. And he’s missed her, he’s missed her _unspeakably_ , and he—

‘You smell the same,’ she’s saying vaguely, as though reading his mind, and perhaps, somehow, she is. It feels dizzying: her lips move against his open collar, unwittingly brushing the skin of his neck, and the Doctor almost shivers. ‘S’unfair. How would I even know how you smelled?’

‘I don’t know.’ And he doesn’t, he doesn’t know or understand, and it feels so odd, so ridiculous and foreign because—because—

Because he doesn’t _care_.

She sniffles. ‘This is _so_ fucked up.’

The Doctor nuzzles her hair with his nose; lets his eyes fall closed.

‘Yeah. Sort of. But I _know_ one thing,’ he mutters, somewhere into her hair, ‘I know I wouldn’t want that. For you to have _never existed_. I would never want that, and I would never want you gone. It … it broke my heart, too, just _thinking_ you were.’ 

Rose says, damply, ‘But I am. She is.’

‘No,’ he says, throat tight, ‘you’re  _right here_.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, gee. My fingers are trembling. :)


	7. pity this busy monster

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _‘Ween-dyyy,’ the Master drawls croakily, leaning heavily on the glass, ‘I’m ho-ome!’_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Well, here goes nothing.
> 
> I love each and every one of you that has been reading very dearly. I hope this won't disappoint.
> 
> (There’s a trigger warning for this one, for suicide attempt. Just to be sure.)

‘So,’ she says crisply, sniffling, ‘what do we do _now_?’

‘Well,’ he drawls, tugging uncertainly at his left ear—he notices her eyes tracing the movement hungrily, as though as entranced with his familiarity as he is with hers. ‘We … we start with getting out of the glass box, probably. We find the Master and pacify him next, maybe. Then, Martha, Jack, rescue of sorts. Neutralising the pesky nerve-targeting thingy in my body would be somewhere on the list, too. And, you know, the TARDIS. She’s sort of essential. And then, maybe, we figure out what exactly the Master’s plan _entails_ , aside of replicating the people I’ve met.’

He smacks his lips sheepishly. ‘What d’you think, good plan or bad plan?’

‘Good,’ Rose quips, nodding slightly, ‘organic.’

He nods as well, in a similar manner, and then smiles. And, tentatively, she returns the smile.

Something in the Doctor’s chest uncoils. 

‘Rose Tyler,’ he says, and his voice manages not to snap midway through her name, merely trembling, ‘fancy a leisurely wall-break?’

He half-hopes for a reply as cheeky as flippant as she tends to be, something that would further cement his lingering feeling of almost suffocating elation (which, he half-thinks, seems to be dangerously precarious thus far, dangerously abstract.) Rose’s eyes, however, have zoomed in on something behind him and hardened. She bites into her lip, and her warm hand tightens around his wrist.

‘I don’t think we’ll be needing that,’ she says.

He turns; even though he doesn’t have to. The Master’s presence pierces him from a distance, radiating and seething—whatever walls he’s build up earlier, they are down now, and a heavily coiled stream of conflicting emotions and thoughts hits him like a whiplash. A Time Lord, unconstrained. It’s powerful. Almost dizzying.

The Doctor turns, and he sees gold light. The pane slides open with a hiss of relenting pressure.

‘Ween-dyyy,’ the Master drawls croakily, leaning heavily on the glass, ‘I’m _ho-ome!_ ’

…

Martha sits on the floor with her legs outstretched, gazing blankly at the little black behaviour tabled she has hooked into the security system in order to disable it. It lies innocuously in her lap, looking brittle and likely quite unimportant.

Those impressions, Martha is aware, belie its true nature severely.

( _A little bit like me_ , she can’t help thinking _._ ) 

An audacious thought flits through her mind: oh, the the _potential_ in all this. The sheer expanse of sorely wasted potential brimming within the skewed outline of the Master’s plan. Millions of subtly exquisite solutions and intricacies, millions more of ideas. An entire world contained under a glass dome. It’s …

She inhales shakily. Dare she admit it, even to herself?

It’s _tempting_. Martha has tried to bash the thought, but it’s fruitless—she’s always been drawn towards science and innovation like a magnet. One of the things she’s always found the most fascinating about the Doctor was just this: his utterly beautiful mind contained in the frail, inconspicuous husk of a human body. She can’t help this fascination, it’s her second nature—above all, she is a scientist.

Her fingertips itch. She runs them gently over the smooth surface of the tablet, but she doesn’t dare switch it on. Not _yet_.

She checks the watch instead.  

Martha doesn’t know if this is what waiting for a mine to explode feels like. She doesn’t even _want_ to know, but she wants it to be done already; for it all to _end_. An imprecise but increasingly beckoning half-vision begins to lurk somewhere in the background of her thoughts, and settles there to grow.

It makes her feel impatient.

She’s tired, both with this— _yet another in a long line_ —not exactly wondrous adventure; and with the pattern it faithfully follows. She’s tired with allowing others to determine her utility and areas of operation, and she’s tired with feeling hollow as she follows through.

(Martha _does_ know how perceiving an arising chance feels like. She’s just not entirely sure whether she’s ready to catch it.)

‘Oh, sweet Jesus,’ a raspy voice comes drifting, extremely relieved, and extremely tired. It brings her to the Earth, and to the cold-tiled floor, and to the urgency of the yet-unresolved, not-exactly-hers adventure. ‘Martha. I’ve found you.’

(She also knows that she wants this next one to be hers, and hers _exactly_.)

…

‘You’re regenerating,’ the Doctor observes, indicating the expanding network of brilliantly gold capillaries branching out on the Master’s skin, up his neck and around the fingers. There’s a gun wound through his abdomen, unnaturally dense blood trickling out languidly. _He’s holding it off_ , the Doctor realises, _tricking time and delaying the inevitable._ Time Lords are _masters_ of that. 

‘And you’re fucking _stupid_ ,’ the Master singsongs in response, keeling over and seething. The Doctor thinks he might collapse, give in to the shocking energy ricocheting through his already weakened organism, but he staggers back to his feet and points furiously at Rose.

She has let go of the Doctor’s wrist and edged away from them both, and now stares at the Master with her eyes wide open, breathing through her nose. The other Time Lord might not see it, or he might not _care_ , but the Doctor notices the shaky movement behind her back; she’s trying to draw her rustic-looking gun from the holster.

‘Fucking stupid, and I’ll fucking _prove_ it to you.’

The Master waves his hand at her, roughly—the motion goes slack-halfway and comes off like a fractured loop, a morbid kind of a modern dance. 

‘Rose,’ he rasps out, through clenched teeth, ‘be my pal and shoot him dead, will you?’ 

Rose freezes. The Doctor holds his breath. _No_ , he thinks.

‘No!’ she retorts fiercely, jerking backwards and stumbling into the cell’s wall. The Doctor registers almost absently the way her left hand splays on the cold glass, tainting it with milky fingerprints. The other hand, wielding the gun, is shaking visibly.

‘No, no,’ she is saying, in a fervent voice, ‘I won’t do it. No bloody chance, I _won’t_. This is my _choice_ ; you can’t make me anymore—’

‘Oh, for fuck’s SAKE!’ the Master bellows, smacking his fist on the glass. It trembles, and the echo of his shout thunders across the compartment. ‘I do not _have_ the _time_ for this—analysis!’ he orders loudly, just as Rose is starting to snap back again.

‘Shut down all motor functions, cut off the improvisation, switch to manual. _Now_.’

It’s a brief second but it suffices for the Doctor’s hearts to stop beating.

In a flash, Rose’s entire body goes rigidly slack, straightening into unnatural stiffness. Her eyes zoom in on the Master and remain there, unblinking and hollow—as though locked in a faint, childish surprise. The Doctor recognises that look—it’s the one he’s seen in the eyes of Donna Noble— _days? Hours ago? Does it even matter?_

The default setting.

_Of course he would have an ace up his sleeve, of course he would programme this—a hard reset, a switch for regaining control. Of course he would go as far with the experiment as physically possible, and retreat at the last—_

‘Come to me,’ the Master says, softly, almost dotingly. He’s leaning on the glass wall, supporting himself with one hand so that he doesn’t collapse, and letting out small uneven breaths.

His feverish eyes don’t leave the Doctor’s blood-drained face; neither of them moves. It’s like a dance, in a way, this slow circling: two wounded and preying animals exchanging bites. _And to say Time Lords are in any way subtler than any other species of predators_ , the Doctor thinks bitterly.

Like enchanted, with perfect obedience, Rose walks lithely across the glistening floor. The gun is still clasped in her right hand, stiff against her side.

‘I thought,’ the Master croaks out, in a hoarse, weak voice, and for everything he could be right now—cheering, taunting, patronising—he sounds nothing less than betrayed, wounded deeply by something (or _someone?_ ) who he’d once unwisely thought to trust, and then learned his lesson.

‘I thought that you would see it. I thought I could _make_ you see. You were always deluded, but you weren’t a bloody idiot. Or I hoped you weren’t. Because clearly, clearly you _are_. And it’s … it’s all fucking hopeless.’

He barks out a laugh but there’s neither mirth nor triumph in it, just cynical anguish, ‘You think you’ll replace them, don’t you? A perfectly synthetic substitute, faultless, unbreakable—what better fucking painkiller, is that right? Or you think, you’ll make _yourself_ human, you’ll train yourself into this perfect oblivion, make yourself deaf, and blind, and _happy_. You know what? I thought so, too!’

A pause. ‘Well, surprise, Wendy,’ he hisses, ‘but it doesn’t fucking work.’

The Doctor starts to beg.

‘Don’t,’ he says, ‘Please. Don’t. Just think about it. Koschei, _please_ , think. I’m begging you. We can start over. We can do anything, I swear. It doesn’t have to end like this. It doesn’t, for God’s sake!’

The Master is shaking his head, slowly, as though in belief. ‘He doesn’t understand.’

He gestures to Rose, who remains unmoving and unresponsive. ‘He doesn’t understand,’ he repeats, weakly.

‘You think you’re the only one suffering, don’t you?’ he then addresses the Doctor, in a low voice. ‘Even now. And you were always like that, always … as though you’re the only person in the whole fucking creation that can feel pain. You wrap yourself in it, and make it your cherished hamartia. The Doctor, the martyr, his saint and holy guilt! And it’s so bloody _easy_ to use as an excuse not to see what’s in front of you. Not to listen.’

He breaks off. ‘Couldn’t you, just fucking once, couldn’t you have listened to me when I needed you to?’

Time unfolds around them like thinning smoke. _(Couldn’t you have taken me with you? Couldn’t you have saved me?)_

Hoarsely, the Doctor says, ‘I’m listening now.’ 

The Master looks like he’s on the verge of tears. ‘You’re fucking _late_.’

There’s a pause. When he speaks again, he sounds almost broken. ‘Do it, Rose.’

 _No_ , the Doctor thinks pitifully, _the universe wouldn’t be that cruel._

Rose turns. Raises her hand. Aims the gun. It’s a beautiful motion; driven with infallible precision and ease. Her eyes are calm, expressionless.

 _Poor, poor killer,_ a caustic voice in his mind answers, _why shouldn’t it?_

…

‘What do you mean _, you killed the Master with a rifle_ , and _then_ _he escaped_?’

Martha’s voice is barely even incredulous.  

They’re sitting on the floor, leaning against the glass wall of one of the compartments. She’s dusty and sticky with cobwebs, and Jack well and thoroughly smeared with dirt and blood. She suspects they both look somewhat miserable.

Jack’s voice is pleading. He wrings his hands helplessly. ‘I don’t know. He must’ve regenerated or … something. I don’t know. I really, _truly_ don’t remember. When I woke up, there was this … great big puddle of blood and no Master. Like he’s fucking evaporated.’

A tried chord of Martha’s tired mind stirs. ‘Could he have?’

Jack blinks. ‘Could he have what?’

‘Evaporated,’ Martha clarifies, impatiently. ‘I mean, do they do that, Time Lords? Maybe he was, like, too dead to regenerate, or something. You don’t know what happens then. They _might_ evaporate. I mean, for all the information the Doctor’s willing to share—’

For a brief moment, the expression on Jack’s face coagulates into a perfect mix of confusion, reluctance and a dawning, vaguely horrendous, possibility. Then Martha shakes her head with a sigh, ‘No, that’s wishful thinking. He’s probably alive and kicking. And doing something … I don’t know. Twisted. Impossible to understand.’

(It irks her that she won’t be offered even _that_ —no whole explanation, just the feeble shreds and scraps the Doctor considers suitable to confine in her. She’s nothing but a pawn again, this time accordingly to her own wishes: he’s never promised her clarity, and never hinted at equality between them, on the plane of … well, on _any_ plane. Martha wonders whether continuing to yearn for both of these things even so makes her an idealist. Perhaps.)

‘I just hope he didn’t get Rose,’ Jack says sullenly, once more inviting her back to reality. Martha gives a weak nod. She hopes that, too, and she hopes the Doctor won’t—or _didn’t_ —do anything too rash and falsely righteous, that would later become another reason to grieve.

‘And I just hope the Doctor’s dealt with his nerves,’ she adds aloud, forlornly. That’s easier to put in words, and easier to share with Jack. Physical pain always seems more substantial.

It’s also a bit of a shortcut, phrasing-wise—at least judging by Jack’s expression.

‘His—what? His _nerves_?’ he repeats, guardedly. Then he blinks, cottoning on to something, ‘Wait—you’ve found the Doctor? Where is he?’ 

‘I don’t know,’ Martha mutters disconsolately, too tired to elaborate on the clumsy wording, ‘he’s told me to disable the security system, and I disabled the security system, or at least I _think_ I did, and then—’ 

‘Yeah?’ Jack prompts her.

‘Well, I don’t know.’ She worries her lower lip. ‘How can you tell if a security system’s disabled?’

Jack frowns again. ‘Uh, fair point. I’ve no idea.’

The words have barely left his mouth when a billowing blare of rippling golden light spills into the corridor through the thin cracks in the ceiling, mingled with a drawn-out, anguished cry. Martha’s heart skips a beat.

‘And that would be one of them,’ she says in a hollow voice, feeling violently sick. ‘Wanna bet which?’

…

Rose’s eyelids twitch. _I’m sorry_ , the Doctor thinks, _Rose, I’m so, so sorry. I almost believed we could have it. I almost forgot._

She jerks her hand back, pushes the muzzle roughly into her right temple, pulls the trigger.

He doesn’t fully comprehend what happens later, but there seems to be some ubiquitous, unrelenting noise, a deafening howl about them.

The gun fires, clouding Rose’s head with lucid blue smoke, the Master screams, reaching out too late to try and yank her hand away and the Doctor lunges forward, hollering something incoherent like it’s been him who was shot, not her.

And then Rose is limp in his arms, and the Master is laughing, hysterically, and then coughing up blood, and then sliding limply downwards the glass pane with something in the way of a sob.

The Doctor is numb. A white noise keeps ringing in his ears; that can’t have happened, not _again_ , not because of _him_ , not right after he believed she’s—but there is no _blood_ , and there is no _wound_ , and her eyes are closed, mouth parted, but is she breathing? Are the Hosts even capable of breathing while in default? Is she even still a Host?

‘What the hell happens now?’ he shouts hoarsely. ‘Why the hell would she _do_ that if you—’ 

‘I don’t know,’ the Master wheezes out, neither laughing nor crying now, but sickly pale. He seems to be too weak for further delay; his skin begins to seem translucent in parts, unnaturally yellowing. The regeneration is progressing in shackled and steep, uneven waves, causing spasms over his entire body, ‘I don’t fucking _know_.’

The Doctor clutches desperately at Rose. ‘There’s no blood.’ 

‘There wouldn’t be any blood, you moron, it’s a _taser_. It’s just meant to look vintage, like everything in this goddamned place.’

‘So will she live?’ the Doctor asks, and thinks he might be crying now, and there’s hardly a threshold between the nerve-targeted radiation setting his veins on fire, the sweat and nausea induced by the drugs and the raw pit of despair opening up in him. ‘Is she programmed to survive it? _Can_ she survive it?’

‘Not without a hard reset,’ the Master grits out, deliriously, ‘they’re meant to be … _efficient_ , not fucking terminators.’

It’s roughly then that Rose wakes up with a shuddering breath and the Doctor nearly chokes.

She looks mildly distressed, confused maybe, like she has slipped on the floor and fallen over. She focuses her surprised eyes on the Doctor with some difficulty.

‘Hello,’ she says, tentatively. ‘I didn’t—’

‘Oh, fuck me,’ the Master groans, hiding his face in his shiningly translucent hands. ‘Fucking _fuck_ me.’

‘—shoot you, did I?’

‘Hello,’ the Doctor says dazedly, grinning at her and feeling as though someone has snagged him on the head with a hammer, ‘you were dead. Again. _Again_ , Rose. But no, no shooting. Not of me, anywa—ah, welcome back.’

‘Seems like I’m not very good at dying,’ Rose replies vaguely, trying to sit up with the support of an arm looped around the Doctor’s neck. 

‘Don’t get better at it,’ the Doctor pleads. ‘Please.’

‘He must’ve set the taser to kill those reading as Hosts only.’ Rose reflects on it. ‘Looks like I’ve upgraded.’

Whatever response he might have handpicked from the dancing shackles of his once-working brain, it’s drowned out by a blare of light coming from the Master, and a tormented cry.

Suppressing a regeneration is not a treat in which he indulges too often, the Doctor has to admit, but one thing is certain: it’s nothing pleasurable, and nothing that could end well. _But that_ , it strikes him suddenly; a coherent thought rising like a phoenix out of the ashes of sanity, _is exactly what Koschei aims for._

‘Oh, no,’ the Doctor bellows, standing up and pulling the still-stunned Rose with himself, to tower over the Master. For the first time, perhaps, ever since he’s woken up plugged to his electric chair, he feels no less than livid. ‘No no _no_. Don’t you _dare_. You don’t get to—’

‘I don’t get to _what_?’ the Master whispers, looking very ill, and very small. ‘End my life when there’s … ah, nothing in it left for me? I don’t _think_ … you get to say that.’

‘Don’t.’ The Doctor breathes through his nose. ‘Don’t do it.’

‘Try and stop me,’ the Master wheezes in response.

‘Regenerate, you _idiot_ ,’ he Doctor snaps in retort, voice rising. ‘You have no choice, anyway, it’s too late. You _have_ to regenerate.’

It’s neither a particularly convincing nor threatening statement, but perhaps it’s the sheer stubborn conviction that does it instead: the Master lets out a last heart-rending cry, face contorted with pain, and then explodes into a siege of light.

Rose recoils first, pulling the Doctor back by his shirt.

‘Jesus,’ he thinks he hears her saying, almost drowned out by the dry and cracking sizzle of sound erupting from the ball of light that has once been the Master, ‘not this again. I bloody _hate_ this part.’

He backs them up into the corner of the glass box remotest from the hypernova of a Time Lord he can locate, and waits—because what else is there to do? He’s still clutching at Rose’s waist, refusing to let her go; still afraid she will dissolve into bright light as well, and disappear once again. She doesn’t seem to mind, but instead says, ‘ _Look_.’

From the far-reaching golden afterglow behind the glass, two silhouettes emerge. Martha looks suspiciously dusty, Jack is black all over, both are panting. They’re also shouting something but it goes amiss—the light fades, and there’s someone new on the stage, someone defeated.

She looks almost funny in the rancid remains of the erstwhile Master’s silken suit. Her eyes are blue.

She says, somewhat weakly, ‘And this was me, waving the white flag, in case you haven’t caught that. Have fun rejoicing.’

…

‘By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask,’ Jack ventures curiously, flicking a random switch on the lab’s console idly. ‘What do you remember from being dead? The first time, I mean. The got-sucked-into-the-void one.’

Rose looks at him like he’s being purposefully daft. ‘I don’t remember being _dead_ , Jack,’ she says slowly.

‘Nothing? Aw, come on, not even a peep of the afterlife? We could swap stories, cause I’m _pretty_ sure I’ve seen a—’

‘For Christ’s sake, Jack,’ Martha hisses, swatting his hand away from the switch and pulling it back to the initial setting. ‘Can you stop?’

(It’s not really a lab’s console in the sense that it’s not really a _lab_ at all. It’s a little like looking for a shape in clouds or fire; if you focus enough and want it enough, it _will_ be there. And when Jack musters up enough willpower, he can feel the true nature of the space in the air, anxiously waiting to return to them: the rotor comes trembling out of the deceiving twilight, the coral struts push out of the walls. The TARDIS gathers and solidifies particle by particle around them; containing this little and false reality as though she finds it funny. As though it’s all been nothing but a game of hide-and-seek all along.)

Layers on layers of lies. Jack’s head hurts with the concept of it—he thinks, only half-seriously, that he understands why the Master’s head _exploded_. He doesn’t say it aloud, because he thinks that Martha might easily smack him if he does.

For quite unexpectedly, she seems to be the one most acutely agitated, in the aftermath of everything that has happened. She’s solemn, exasperated, and she keeps picking anxiously at the cuffs of her shirt. 

‘Kidding, I’m just kidding—don’t kill me!’ he now defends himself, holding up his hands. ‘There’s been enough of _that_ going on lately, don’t you—’

‘ _Jack!_ ’

‘Joke! Joke!’ 

Truth is, he finds it easier not to properly _think_ while they’re still all together, bundled up in the Westworld’s control centre—ah, pardon his French, _TARDIS console room_ —because Jack knows that once he lets himself think, and process, and form conclusions, he will not be able to serve as the comic relief for everyone else. _Which_ , he reasons vaguely, kicking his leg up and down, _is sort of a holy mission of mine._ _Or_ _something_. 

So far, he’s managed to point out they look like ‘clones’ in the Westworld-worker issued T-shirts and jackets— _not a very good point to make_ , he later concedes, _in present circumstances_ —and half-heartedly joke about how now the Master is a woman, maybe she’ll have better things to do than being a sociopathic evil mastermind; earning himself a murderous glare from Martha and a half-assed scuffle with Rose, who tries to prove—an even _less_ appropriate, possibly—point that any woman can be an evil mastermind if only she wants to.

Which, obviously, leads to a rather morose silence, because _no_ , that’s _not_ what they’re aiming for.

Another thing that Jack suspects adds up to the general strain is the issue of who becomes what in their new arrangement: there’s _him_ , for example, and Martha, and then there’s Rose (and incidentally, it’s the _right_ kind of Rose this time, a Rose who remembers all sorts of Rose-things and displays a delightful variety of Rose-quirks), and there’s _one_ TARDIS and _one_ Doctor.

And Jack would gladly proclaim that _the more the merrier_ and nod enthusiastically towards a more intricate, broader Team TARDIS (perhaps he’d manage to smuggle Ianto and Gwen onboard, too), but he suspects that might not be on the menu for everyone. Because then there’s the matter of who Rose may or may not be to the Doctor, and perhaps who Martha and him aren’t, and the matter of the Doctor himself being rather beaten up by reality, just as much, if not more, than them.

And _then_ , there’s the matter of the Master.

…

‘It is a fickle thing, to create a consciously thinking bioandroid body for a vortex-driven entity imprinted on a _seemingly_ dead human woman’s mind,’ the Doctor says in a falsely amiable, promising voice. ‘You never know; you might just resurrect someone accidentally in the process.’

‘You enjoy this, don’t you?’ the Master bites back, looking surly, and tired, and _extremely_ frizzy-haired. ‘You’re just as bad as I am.’

‘No,’ the Doctor sighs, dropping his act. ‘What I _am_ , though, is trying to remind myself why I kept you from dying back there. So far, you’re not doing a very good job on the support of my theory that you might not be quite rotten to the bone yet.’

‘Go kiss yourself,’ she says sulkily, folding her arms. ‘You _so_ do enjoy this. Pointing out the one mistake. The _one_ —the rest was perfect, alright? And it’s not my fault your stupid assistant went skinny-dipping in the vortex. How should I have known?’

The Doctor’s face is stony. ‘How indeed,’ he mutters.

He reminds himself, once again, that Bloody Revenge isn’t very high on the list of the values composing the Doctor’s righteous credo. Having re-acquainted himself with the point concerning _forgiveness_ and _good will,_ he pulls himself together, and returns to his interrogation. 

‘The taser was set for Hosts only,’ he probes.

No response. The Master studies her nails with a look of a deep reverie on her face. The Doctor releases a calming breath. It’s going to get some more prodding to eke out a reaction, clearly.

‘Which means, you didn’t really want to kill me,’ he develops deliberately. ‘And why is that?’

Shockingly blue eyes snap up, almost taking the Doctor by surprise.

‘Why would I?’ she demands. ‘What point would that serve? I wanted to show _you_ that you were deluded, the bitter epiphany and all that, blah blah, not remind _myself_ of it as I stood over your smouldering remains with a grieving android—oh, pardon me, a _vortex-driven entity_ —at hand. I already knew that much, thanks.’

The Doctor lets it sit for a second, mainly so that _he_ doesn’t get up and kick something. His left eye twitches. ‘Sort of backfired, though, didn’t it?’ he hazards finally.

‘Sort of _stop_ _gloating about it_ , darling?’ the Master retorts.

The Doctor’s teeth clench. ‘I’m not glo—look, aren’t you even the _least bit_ concerned about what could have happened? About the consequences of it all?’

He tries to sound reasonable; winds up with something in the way of impatiently incredulous.

_(For God’s sake, you’re a Time Lord. It’s not like you can’t predict the possible coil of time.)_

The Master groans. ‘No, you _look_ ,’ she counters stubbornly. ‘I didn’t kill anyone; can’t you appreciate that? I even did the _opposite_. That should be something, by your book of noble standards, to even out the scales a bit. Like this dog, whathisname, _Anubis_. Weighing my heart at the golden gates of the Ever After, and look at all those pretty new little souls brought to this godly world on my account! Angelic!’

The Doctor swallows. He tries to work up a properly contained ethical fury, and launch into a moralising lecture, but can’t seem to find it in himself at the moment. It occurs to him that this entire conversation strikes a wrong note; it’s too severely, inappropriately flippant; and that is due to the Master being unwilling to let it become real and thus unbearable, and the Doctor being too tired to do something about it.

Because he is tired. More so, he is exhausted: immensely, ridiculously weary with pain, relief and slowly dissolving tension. And as cringe-worthy as the argument is, the Master—or, _Missy_ , as she keeps hissily correcting him—genuinely _hasn’t_ killed anyone.

Something unpleasant occurs to him. _Well, except for Jack._  

‘You did kill Jack,’ the Doctor says, to prove a point. ‘ _Twice_.’

Missy stares at him. ‘Yes,’ she then says, caustically, ‘let’s all have a merry little burial later on. He can take pictures as we light up candles. Maybe Rose will sing. Look—first of all? He _also_ killed me, so could we maybe call it a draw? And I, unlike him, had the decency to properly _die_.’

‘Technically, regene—’

‘ _Come_ on,’ she snaps. ‘I could’ve done, I don’t know, _world domination_. I could’ve done a slave race, faithful to their Master. I could’ve done something _big_. And yet I chose a Disneyland with just a teensy bit too many Easter Eggs for you to uncover. That seems to me like the kind of a big little sin that you can easily,’ she smiles a syrupy smile, ‘be _absolved_ for.’ 

The Doctor blinks, then runs his hands across his face. _No_ , he thinks wearily, _I do not have the strength for this conversation. Not now. It has to be done, but I can’t do it now._

Missy eyes him speculatively, apparently snuffling the weakness. ‘Does it count if I say I’m sorry?’ she asks coyly.

The Doctor eyes Missy speculatively in turn.

It’s still the Master inside her, and there’s always a large margin of doubt mandatory to attribute to each of the Master’s words and deeds, but there’s also something vaguely, seamlessly _softer_ about this new Master. It’s not remorse, perhaps, or not even a _prelude_ to it, but somewhere along the way, maybe—

‘ _No_ ,’ the Doctor says sourly, and Missy groans again, rolling her eyes. ‘For now, I’m locking you up in a … in a vault. In the TARDIS. Until you come to your senses and we can talk. _Properly_ talk. You’re on indefinite probation. Like … like _jail_.’

Still, there remains a truth too flimsy to express in speech: the fact that the Doctor is _unable_ not to forgive her. The Master, for better or for worse, is the closest he has to a literal, biological family. The Master is a proof of the fact that he has a past; his only return to Gallifrey.

 _Gallifrey_. Even the very name feels different now: less like a painful and feverish nightmare; more like a knife-wound to his flesh. Gallifrey has existed, and someone remembers it. Someone that isn’t him.

And for the first time, perhaps, he begins to understand the reverence humans attribute to this particular kind of ties: my kin, my blood, my brother and my sister. Fault or not, psychosis or not, he is unable to commit any more judgements on somebody else than himself.

_(‘But you never understood choices, did you?’)_

He thinks of _her_ , with her bloodied shirt and heart warmer than his—even while put into motion by despair and hatred.

Well, now’s a time as good as ever to start, if not understanding choices, then at least _respecting_ them. And this will be the Master’s choice—sometime, sometime after the flurry of possibilities ceases to rage around them in an electrical farrago—how to continue her own thread. How to repent. Repair. Or how to flee.

‘Or like a _very cherished friend_ ,’ she now suggests sarcastically. ‘If you’re nice enough, we might even develop a nice little Stockholm syndrome.’

The Doctor doesn’t reply, his thoughts involuntarily straying somewhere else. Somewhere far away, up in space and suspended out of time, where they can all uncoil and relent, and possibly consider a new way to intercept with one another, under a different scattering of time and circumstance.

(She already has his forgiveness. She’s had it before she would think to ask.)

But in his defence, the Doctor reasons, brightening somewhat, he’s always quite favoured hope among the emotions.

...

_**(epilogue)** _

The canyon does look breath-taking. There is something inevitably beautiful in the precision with which he has brought his enterprise to life—a stunning sense of grandiosity, perhaps. But then, perhaps also a hint of idealism. A proof of searching for an answer, at any rate. It simply _looks_ too intricate to be merely whimsical.

 (Or so the Doctor thinks. _Hopes_.)  

The fact of having contained this world in a causality bubble of half-reality, just at the precipice of the current universe, makes the parallel even easier to perceive: like Alice through the looking glass, the invitation to the distorted Wonderland is handed to you by a scared creature with an unhealthy mania of time.

He wonders what those humans must have felt, lured into this horrific and beautiful miracle and encouraged to pollute and violate it. What it must’ve felt like to watch them: becoming their worst selves and muffling out the regret or remorse; then walking on blithe and untainted by the memory. Something so unattainable, so unthinkable in this, for someone like him. A forbidden fruit? The Master has put the thought in words— _blind, and deaf, and happy._

He thinks, with a sting between the hearts, that this world _is_ like a journal of a scientist in a way, genuinely. He can’t tell that to Missy yet, not without betraying his premature and foolish forgiveness—but he can silently acknowledge it. A journal of impossible things, a witness of degradation. Notes on the degrees of self-punishment.

(It feels, at times, slightly too much like an echo own thoughts. The only substantial difference lies in execution.)

There remains, still and undeniably, a substantial amount of trouble lingering in the creator’s wake. The new dilemma in the shape of Missy—who fails to properly acknowledge the fault in her reasoning thus far, leaving the Doctor to try and deal, for instance, with the matter of several people from his past gaining sudden and rather confused clones.

But there _has_ to exist some properly alien plane on which they can peacefully continue their existence without more suffering than this which is granted by a human life. Somewhere quite different from the scathing reality they were inspired with, and somewhere a little less grotesque than a—thankfully already _closed_ —entertainment park for humans. Somewhere properly different. The Doctor thinks the planet Tleilax. Or perhaps Australia.

And there remains his bitter pill to swallow that has a mildly sweet aftertaste. He replays Martha’s declaration in his head, and analyses it: _I won’t travel with you, but I want to study what he has done here. I want to make it useful. I want to make it right._

He still sees her, if he concentrates enough: standing before him in the blue-lit room that is his own, disguised home; with her dark and gleaming eyes, nervous and excited as she clutches the behaviour tablet for adjusting the Hosts. 

He has smiled at her, and said what he had to say. She has smiled back, and then she has said, _I want you to know that I’m thankful. And … you won’t believe it, but I ... I really don’t regret a single thing. Really._

He _really_ does not believe it—painfully aware of all his shortcomings towards her through what little time they’ve shared—but perhaps he should at least try. _Oh ye of little faith_. A lesson to learn in there, supposedly.

Jack doesn’t seem to hold a grudge.

(It runs deeper, the Doctor knows, a deep and relentlessly reviving wound of a living paradox. Who would recognise it better than himself? A creature unable to die must long for it as much as a dying one longs for more life.)

He half-wants to tell Jack that it’s _not that bad_ , that there’s _a lot to live for_ , but can’t quite bring himself to do it. It would feel too cheap and too insincere; like a betrayal. And he owes Jack and his—impressively intact, yet—faith quite a bit.

‘But I want a Guest Pass,’ the captain’s said, only half-jokingly. ‘Trips, from time to time. A call-the-Doctor service, so to say. No more playing hard to get, you blasted pretty boy.’

(And he’s winked. And smacked the Doctor somewhere rather strategic.)

He supposes—no, _knows_ , with a startlingly cold conviction—that there could have been a different end to it all. A colder strand of possibility, blooming into a drastically more hopeless reality. The Doctor stares unseeingly at the orange glare of the sun enveloping the angels and ravines looming ahead of him _._ A new responsibility, and new guilt but also something else, something precious, growing from it.

 _Well_. His throat tightens. _Possibly growing. I still haven’t—_

‘ _These violent delights have violent ends_. That’s what I told him, back when I was all Bad Wolf. Sort of fits, though, don’t you think? _’_

Her voice comes out of nowhere. The Doctor turns, something fluttery and anxious settling inside him, an almost impossible warmth twined with nervous fear.

Rose is standing a couple of steps behind him, dressed in a clean-cut uniform of the laboratory with his Janis Joplin coat flung on top. It’s much too large for her, making her appear unusually small. Her hair is trembling, flyaway around her thoughtful face. The peachy light paints soft shadows on her cheeks.

‘Where’s it from? I forget,’ the Doctor says, voice hoarse with fondness. Rose blinks and looks up to him—and smiles, somewhat shyly, with one corner of her mouth. He cherishes the smile, fixates on it. Almost gets distracted.

‘Dunno,’ she replies, sheepishly. Then she laughs, as though realising the absurdity of the statement. ‘I probably haven’t even read it at all. But it’s been … playing in my head, over and over. He kept whispering it to me, that other you. Although,’ she frowns. ‘That wasn’t really him, was it? In the end t’was all me. Or the Bad Wolf. Which means … it means …’ she hesitates, ‘… means I don’t get it.’

She bites her lip with a helpless shrug and gives him a quizzical look.

He shakes his head slightly. ‘I don’t, either. Truly—I have no idea what to make of it. This whole … enterprise, as he liked to call it. I think it’s exceeded my capacities as much as it’s exceeded his. I don’t think even _he_ knew what he was aiming for, truth be told, and … well, it’s become a mystery now. Of the unsolvable sort, I’m afraid.’

‘ _And the rest was silence_ ,’ Rose concludes resolutely, lifting her chin up. ‘And that’s Hamlet, if you wanna know. Read it all by myself in ninth grade. Mickey didn’t, the lazy bugger.’

‘I never knew you to be a goodie-two-shoes in school, Rose Tyler,’ the Doctor muses. ‘Something about a choir riot pops into my mind …?’ 

Rose cocks her head to one side with a smirk, ‘Oh, but there’s plenty you don’t know about me.’

When he quirks an eyebrow at her, she bursts out laughing. ‘What can I say? I am a woman of mystery.’

He thinks it’s pure mirth in her eyes now, this elusive and wondrous quality she has, of finding amusement in the most contradictorily dark aspects of her life; and helping _him_ find it, too.

And he thinks the Master has been right in one aspect: he has been _stupid_. Too stupid to fathom and too stupid to _ever_ justify in any of the solar systems he’s busily travelled through; to have doubted she was anything more and anything less than herself. _Rose_.

He holds out his hand and feels the nervous hope radiating off him violently: in the barely concealed smile, in the anxious trembling fingers and cautiously deliberate, carefully quiet words.

‘We could meet Hamlet, if you’d like,’ he says, nearly choking himself on hope, ‘well. Not Hamlet per se. That’d be slightly out of my—impressive even so—travel capacities. But as close as it gets to the inspiration in the flesh with Shakespeare, maybe? That’s a possibility. Or … something else entirely. A new new adventure. The new new Doctor and … the new new Rose. And a new new vault with a new new Master. A new new _Missy_ , sorry. Well, I can’t exactly hide her from the bill, now, can I? But anyway, all this in the … old old TARDIS. Which has, er, sounded somewhat better in my head, but maybe—’ 

He’s babbling, and he feels somewhat ridiculous. The dying sun makes Rose’s face blaze up into something radiant. She’s almost too bright to look at, and it makes him feel even more nervous.

She takes his hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Aaand ... cut! The end. I just want to say, I am so, so grateful for each review and kind word and the pressed heart button. You’re all angels, you are. Honestly.
> 
> (Also. Talk to me, maybe? I'd love to hear what you think. I have so much to tell that just can't be said inside this story.)


End file.
